I sorted through my hospital bag, until I found again the notebook I had kept during my pregnancy. I turned to the last blank page and wrote a single letter.
Dear Joseph,
On the night before you were born, I looked outside to see a statue of Mary, with her hands out: once torn open, now fully healed. There was an orange tree and a lemon tree in full fruit in the middle of winter. I took that image, and I sewed it into your heart, so that you would be born with it inside of you.
Part Four
The Magical Hours
“A pearl buried deep in a field is not visible.”
—Simone Weil
The Things of This World
We returned to Jerusalem during the window between Orthodox Christmas and the visit of George W. Bush, this time with a tiny human creature tucked against me. I was anxious to rest, but Nablus Road had other plans, and the house soon filled up with an assembly of guests: Abu Hossam and his wife and all of their sons carrying a plastic bouquet of flowers, the entire Freij family, Mexican nuns carting baby clothes, and a local tailor offering winter pajamas. Sister Pascal arrived on the first day, followed by a line of Franciscan nuns in blue habits.
“Joseph is from our house,” she proudly announced to the assembled visitors, as though she were the one who had just suffered through ten hours of labor. Then she cradled my son in her arms until he cried, and she carefully handed him back to me.
I was grateful now for such a cavernous house, and while she had been right in the beginning to warn us that it was much too big for two people, now it was just big enough to accommodate the ever-swelling crowds from the street. The front-porch gang made their way upstairs, with bags of onesies and hats and baby shoes, and my friend Karen, who was relieved that she could now bear gifts without giving me the evil eye, arrived with a Noah’s Ark wall hanging inscribed in Hebrew. I wondered how such a terrifying biblical story, of a family surviving mass death and an entire planet being submerged in a flood, had inspired so many children’s decorations. My father watched, dazed at the French and Arabic and Hebrew speakers ascending and descending the stairs.
As the poet Richard Wilbur wrote, “Love calls us to the things of this world.” Joseph, still not fully awake, pressed himself into the indent of my arms, and he cried when he was hungry and whimpered when he was tired, just as Umm Hossam had promised, and though he didn’t teach me everything, he taught me enough to get by. At the end of every day, I would be relieved that the guests had come and more relieved that they had left, and I would settle with Joseph into the cocoon that we inhabited together, two bodies still functioning as one. I had been traveling for too long, and now I felt some force stronger than gravity pulling me down to that house on Nablus Road: love and family and the discovery that my existence was now bound up, inextricably, in the bodies of two other people. Every hour or so, Frédéric would tend the fire in the woodstove. Joseph would awaken in the middle of the night, and Frédéric would wake up just to lift him from the small wooden crib next to our bed, out of the woolen sheepskin and into my arms, where he would drink from my body. I was still weak from surgery, and Frédéric would wake again when I finished, just to lift him and ferry him back to the crib to sleep. My breasts filled and emptied and filled again for a child; my husband kept a vigil of holiness he had never expected, lying in wait. Entire stories were written in those brief encounters. I watched a man become a father, lifting a child and placing him back again in a brief ceremony that Joseph would never remember, but which meant everything.
I called those hours between midnight and six in the morning the magical hours. I had known about them for years: from Muslims who believed that those hours before dawn held silence during which one would grow closer to God; from Jews who awakened an hour before sunrise to bind tefillin to their arms in prayer; from monks in the Eastern churches who arose early for the matins, ending at sunrise. A chapter in the Quran is called “The Morning Hours,” and my Quranic teacher in Syria had awakened each morning to pray in that brief window before the sun rose. In Jerusalem, pilgrims spent the night inside of the Holy Sepulchre and referred to those hours—when the world was silent, save for the lighting of candles—as the Magical Hours.
So it was, at four in the morning, when Joseph cried, and Frédéric lifted him from his crib, and it was just the three of us in the stillness of the city, the birds above and the dead below and this little life, calling out, in the magical hour. Time stretched out, so that I often did not know if a few minutes or several hours had passed. The city carved out the smallest space of light and silence left in it, and allowed us to inhabit it, and for the first time I understood what it was to occupy sanctity in time. Then the three of us collapsed into sleep. In the morning, I would awaken in a bed damp with my milk.
The rhythms of motherhood emerged, and I ate when Joseph ate and slept when he slept, and a world shifted in focus. My life, which had already transformed beyond imagining with marriage, now changed shape again, which is the case when any two strange humans, be they thirty years old or three days old, encounter each other and decide to fall in love. The world must realign itself.
Frédéric, who had always been the calm, steady presence in our marriage, was not so in parenthood. He worried incessantly. When Joseph slept too long, I would find Frédéric next to his crib, checking to make sure that he was still breathing. When he was finally convinced that the baby was merely asleep, he would pull the blue knitted blanket up to his chin to keep him warm, but then a few minutes later—worried that he would overheat—he would return to pull it down again.
He acquired the habit of pacing back and forth with Joseph draped over his shoulder, patting his back softly in time. He would pass hours of every day in this routine, as a father who understood that he could not rid the world of every danger it would pose for his son, but that he could at least hold the gas at bay. A few days into Joseph’s life, I awakened wearily in the morning, to see Frédéric pacing back and forth in front of the window with his son nestled against him, barely visible beneath the folds of his little blue knitted sweater. I had stopped nursing hours before, and it occurred to me that Frédéric had been up since then, pacing back and forth in front of the window, singing softly…
Au clair de la lune
Mon ami Pierrot
Prête-moi ta plume
Pour écrire un mot.
Ma chandelle est morte
Je n’ai plus de feu
Ouvre-moi ta porte
Pour l’amour de Dieu
I rubbed my eyes. “How long have you been awake?”
“A few hours.” He grew quiet again, continuing to hum softly. He seemed to be pondering something while he continued his steady line of walking back and forth in front of the window.
“You know, all of those years, when I was a novice monk, I tried to wake up in the middle of the night to pray, and every time I fell back asleep. I can’t tell you how many times I tried!” He blushed. “I guess that it took a child to make me be able to stay awake all night!”
He continued pacing until I pointed out that Joseph was sleeping, and he softly lowered him into his crib. In the garden beneath us, the tinkle of the bell summoned nuns to their sunrise prayers.
Memory
The first week of motherhood passed in a haze of feeding and sleep. When Joseph turned seven days old, I called Dr. George to schedule my son’s first-week checkup.
“Is something wrong?”
“No, the hospital just said that I should come for a checkup when a week had passed.”
He snorted. “I don’t understand. If there’s nothing wrong, why would you possibly bring that baby out in the cold?” Palestinians, from what I could tell, were generally terrified of cold weather, much like Texans. Dr. George seemed to be under the impression that if I took Joseph outside then he might freeze to death.
I insisted. “I really think that I should bring him for a checkup.”
“But nothing’s wrong with him. Is an
ything wrong with you?”
It was the first time anyone had asked about me since the birth. “No. I mean, not really. I have hemorrhoids.”
“You’re hemorrhaging!” Dr. George screamed.
“No, no, no. I have hemorrhoids.”
He sighed. “Oh, that’s totally normal. Go to the pharmacy and buy some medicine, and then bathe in some chamomile. It’s good for you.”
Then he hung up the phone.
Three days later, despite the biting cold and my own doctor’s advice, I decided to take Joseph to the hospital. What if he hadn’t gained enough weight? What if his umbilical cord had become infected? I bundled him up in three warm winter blankets and descended the steps, to the clucking of neighbors assembled around the front door, who could not believe that I would bring a child out into the cold.
“Haraam, haraam,” two women said under their breath as I passed them by. “What a shame.”
I caught the minibus to Bethlehem as quickly as I could, finding a seat in the back next to an elderly woman, balancing baby Joseph across my knees. I fixed his blanket, ran my finger across his mouth in fear that his breath might grow cold. I was just anxious to get there and get home again. We were halfway to the checkpoint when an Israeli soldier on the side of the road signaled to the driver to pull over for no apparent reason. Two soldiers sauntered onto the bus. The one in front had a rifle that swung low and loose from his shoulder, so that when he came to inspect my passport it hung over Joseph’s head and brushed against my legs. They pulled two passengers off the bus for not having the right papers and then waved to the driver to carry on.
Tears rolled down my cheeks.
“What is it?” the elderly woman asked me.
“He’s only ten days old,” I whispered.
I arrived at the doctor’s an hour later, and she checked us quickly, confirmed that there was nothing wrong with either of us, and sent us on our way again into the cold.
For many days, I could not shake the image of that gun, hanging over Joseph’s head. I had taken him to the hospital in the hopes of keeping him safe, and instead I had exposed him to his first glimpse of violence. The world was full of such dangers, light sockets and drunk drivers and objects he could swallow, and at that moment it seemed a miracle that any of us had survived.
• • •
They say that we are only able to have children again because we forget the pain of childbirth. So it is, also, with the first, anxious days of parenthood. Frédéric and I stumbled through each day. We hesitated to give Joseph his first bath, afraid that he might slip and fall somehow into the small puddle of water we had put into the plastic container. I fretted over diaper changes and late-night wakings, and Frédéric paced next to the bed, in a world suddenly full of sharp corners and flights of stairs, the realization that a child is not only a human being, but contains with him an entire world, and the possibility of losing it.
It was also a season of remembering. At night, reserves of knowledge from my own childhood arrived. I somehow knew how to change a diaper. I knew how to rock an infant to sleep, how to cradle the head. The words to lullabies came unsummoned. It turns out that we do not forget our infancy, but that it simply lies sewn into our hearts in wait until we need it again, to help us guide our own children, to help us understand our own parents. Now I knew that my own mother must have awakened in the night to feed me, that my father had taught me lullabies, that it was only because of a thousand forgotten hours of being cradled that I understood how to do it now. They had stitched those lessons into my heart, and I was astounded to find them there, unblemished after thirty years. It is one of the greatest tragedies that the moments in our lives in which we are with our parents the most correspond with the very years we cannot remember. But Joseph gave me back those moments. I understood not only who he was, but also who I was.
“How many nights did I fall asleep in the rocking chair with you on my shoulder!” my mother exclaimed when I described a sleepless night to her on the phone. I wondered if thirty years after the fact was too late to say thank you.
Our lives took on a monastic rhythm, of nursing and sleeping, singing and sleeping, changing and nursing and sleeping. One day, when Joseph was several weeks old, he gazed up at me, examined my face, and he recognized me. He looked at me, and I looked back at him, with all of the curiosity of two beings who, out of billions, ended up together.
So it’s you, after all? You, after all of this time?
The Language of Childhood
I was startled to awaken one day and discover that my child had turned eight months old. Weeks and months had disappeared, marked by milestones of sitting up and rolling over and sleeping three hours in a row, by the discarding of smaller clothes for larger sets, in a world in which each month, representing such a small part of my own life, was a doubling and tripling of his. For the first months, I hid out with him in our house, sheltering from the cold. Then the winter subsided, and we left the cocoon of our house and entered into the world, with its viruses and pollution and birds and miracles.
There are those children who grow up in the countryside, who can wander through the woods and recognize the smell of pine needles and the earth after rain. Joseph would not be one of those children. I could only bring him to Nablus Road, a street without playgrounds, its only nature the remnants of a valley so buried beneath the city street that it no longer resembled a valley at all, where the noise of traffic distracted from the swallows and sunbirds in flight overhead.
But Nablus Road still contained its own magic: for in the mind of a child, our street spoke every language in the world. Every afternoon, I would carry my son carefully down the flight of stairs outside, at the bottom of which his stroller would be waiting—arabaye in Arabic, which also coincidentally meant “chariot,” a distinction too appropriate in a culture in which children were afforded almost royal status. As I adjusted the straps, inevitably we would cross paths with Mother Maria, busy sweeping away the pink bougainvillea petals from in front of her door. She would lift him up to kiss him on the cheek and speak to him in Spanish. “José,” she would coo affectionately. “Dame un beso.”
Eventually, she would turn to me in apologetic explanation: “I asked Joseph to give me a kiss.”
It was, at first, bizarre to me that she expected Joseph to understand what I could not, but eventually it dawned on me that we all believe that children are born knowing how to speak every language in the world. I’m not sure at what point the rest of us forget how to speak so many languages, but it must belong to the years in which we stop believing in Santa Claus and fairies, in which we cease to have access to a wonder that transcends the laws of the possible. The tragedy of growing up is that we forget not only our languages, but also that we belong to everyone. Yet we retain enough of that wonder to know that children exist in another space. That is why, I presume, each time we meet a baby, we cannot help but speak to him or her in our mother tongue, certain that he or she will understand.
Perhaps we are not wrong. I saw Joseph, moving in for a kiss.
Abu Hossam and the front porch gang would speak to Joseph in the thick Hebronite dialect of Arabic before tousling his hair, and he would react with the same utter familiarity. Several times a week I would bump into Abu Ines, the street cleaner whose job it was to walk up and down Nablus Road in his fluorescent worker’s vest, sweeping up garbage and piles of rotting vegetables into cardboard boxes. Whenever he saw Joseph, he would prop up his broom and dustpan against a wall and run over.
“Zouzou!” he would exclaim, using the Arabic diminutive for Joseph. “Keef halak, habibi?” Then this street sweeper, who before now had no reason at all to speak to me, would turn to start a conversation. “Have you been to Bethlehem lately?”
“I just took Joseph to the doctor there,” I assured him.
Then he would lean over to whisper in Arabic to Joseph in a conspiratorial voice: “Inta Telhami. You’re a Bethlehemite, just like I’m a Bethlehemite. I love you
r whole family, but I will always love you, Joseph, the most, because you’re from Bethlehem. There’s no place in the world more beautiful than Bethlehem.”
Apparently, my toddler already belonged to a tribe.
Once a month, I would carry Joseph to the convent of the Franciscaines de Marie at five o’clock, just before supper, so that the elderly French nuns could pass him around the room and fervently make the sign of the cross on his forehead, repeating again and again with pride that he had come from “their house” and so was part of their family. When I appeared in the door, one of them would call out excitedly to the others in French, “Viens! Viens ici! C’est Joseph, le petit Jésus!”—Come! Come here! It’s Joseph, the little Jesus! Then they would huddle around him, exclaiming how mignon he was, as he clasped their rosary beads within his tiny fist.
It had not occurred to me when we named our son Joseph that we had settled on the one name that seems to exist in almost every language, common to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. He was José to the nuns downstairs, Joseph—but with an emphasis on the “e”—to the French nuns beside us, Yosef to the Israelis, Yusuf to the Palestinians, and Giuseppe to the Italian monks in the Franciscan churches. I was not even fazed walking in the Armenian Quarter of the city, when a local referred to him as Hovsep.
Naturally, Joseph relished the attention and soon learned to turn his head in response to all of them.
Only our neighbor Michel insisted on talking to him in English.
“You’re going to ruin your child!” he muttered. “French, English, Arabic—he’s going to be completely confused! This child will have no idea who he is.”
I would be lying if I did not admit that this concerned me.
Still, this mess of identities was the city in which we lived and also a great gift of childhood—that briefest of windows, in which no one could convince us that there was anything dividing us from each other. Through Joseph, for a few months, a sectarian society so often ghettoized into religions and classes and family feuds, was made whole in the body of a little boy.
A Country Between Page 17