A Country Between

by Stephanie Saldaña

  I was not certain how Joseph got it into his head that the Franciscans at the Holy Sepulchre were the seven dwarfs from Snow White. It could be that they seemed to be plump and balding, with beards and belted robes, or that more than once we had come across them in midsong, so that it was not impossible to imagine that they were heading home after a long day of work at a diamond quarry. It was part of a growing dilemma in a city in which it was difficult to know who was in costume and who was simply dressed in his daily clothes; the week before, Joseph had pointed excitedly to an ultra-Orthodox Jew with an enormous, bushy beard, convinced that he was Santa Claus, just as he was certain that a statue of Saint Bernadette in prayer was playing patty-cake.

  A smiling young Franciscan who recognized Joseph opened his arms in greeting. Joseph rushed into them, and the priest lifted him up and swung him around.

  “It looks like this little one might grow up and be a Franciscan!” he exclaimed. I only smiled, trying to decide whether Joseph thought he was Dopey, Happy, or Sleepy.

  We continued on to our final stop, and Joseph’s favorite chapel of all: a space entered by exiting the humble far door of the basilica and sliding into a barely noticeable courtyard, with nothing more than a square of tiles and a flight of steps leading up to the bathrooms. At the bottom of the steps, a kind Palestinian man in worker’s overalls stood vigil, waiting for the pilgrims to finish using the toilets so that he could enter the stalls and clean up after them. He was never without a mop and a bucket of soapy water.

  Joseph rushed over. “Selem,” the man teasingly ordered, forcing Joseph use his manners, to slow down and shake his hand. Then he obligingly handed over his mop, and with great delight, Joseph set out to do his favorite activity in the whole world: mopping the floors of the church courtyard. The mop was twice his size, and he had to drag it behind him, his young, uncertain steps leaving uneven lines of water along the tiles. But he was a grown-up now, cleaning the holiest site in Christendom, making the navel of the world a little bit shinier, and as he marched up and down, there were birds overhead and candles visible through the door into the church. I sat on the steps and watch my son to the sound of monks singing, barely audible beyond him, drowned out as they were by the sound of pilgrims flushing the toilets.

  Children will always know better than we do who saints are anyway. They will know without being told that the man we should be seeking may not be lighting candles inside of the church, but cleaning toilets beside it. Joseph understood where holiness was in that church in a way that I never had before, and he led me to it. In the center of the church, the face of Jesus in mosaic looked down on us from the ceiling, majestic and golden. When he had finished mopping the floors, Joseph took me there because birds liked to fly in the dome, the flapping of their wings echoing in space. If I have known holiness in my lifetime, it was in standing in that chapel, with Joseph’s face flushed with excitement as he pointed to the roof and shouted: “Look, Mom! Jesus! Birds!” He said it with the same excitement of a boy who sees a very low-flying airplane and reaches out in the hopes that he might catch it in his hands.

  On the way out, there were broken Roman pillars to climb on, which might almost replace another boy’s jungle gym. If we timed it well enough, we could just intersect with the Armenian Orthodox seminarians on their way through the front door, boys in their twenties in long black robes, solemnly singing as they walked toward the tomb, many who couldn’t resist breaking file for an instant to wink at Joseph and stick out their tongues.

  Then he kissed the door one last time, and I kissed him too, still smelling the roses in his forehead, and we entered the streets blessed. I wheeled him home. For us, there was only resurrection. I never took him up the stairs to Golgotha, to visit the chapel of the crucifixion, where Jesus suffered on the cross before crying out. It was there, always, hovering over us, and yet I stayed away, in the same way other mothers protected their children from small objects that could be swallowed, or locked away cleaning products in the cabinet at home. My instinct was to shield him, for now at least. The stairs up to the chapel were slippery, and he might fall. Besides, he was barely two years old. Now was the time for sweetness. There would be time, and only too much time, for sorrow later.

  An Unexpected Battle

  I had been waiting years for our lives to fall apart on Nablus Road. I had watched the long and toxic violence accumulating, expecting the day when it would boil over into full-fledged war, in an alley so accustomed to battle that it wore its scars on doors and windowpanes. I had learned to brace myself, for what would happen when bombs returned to cafés in the city center, a few blocks away. And for years I had lain wait for what would happen on the day when we would, most certainly, have to pack everything into our bags and leave.

  Instead, while I was keeping watch on one front, my life shattered from somewhere else.

  My father Skyped us one Sunday afternoon, and instead of asking to speak to Joseph as he always did, he asked me to call Frédéric to sit beside me. We stared at each other over video from across the world.

  “I have cancer,” he announced quietly. “Lymphoma.” He had been gaining weight for some time and complaining of back pain, so he decided to see the doctor. Tests revealed his body swollen with tumors. It was the same disease that had taken his mother and his grandfather.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  “The doctors say that it’s very treatable,” he insisted.

  But the world as I had known it was gone already. I had been prepared for war, but the only thing I had known for certain in my life was that my father would live forever.

  • • •

  There are those who might write the phrase “my father would live forever” in jest, but my father was not like other men. Since his childhood, he had decided that the ordinary rules of gravity did not apply to him. Unlike others, he did not have to grow up. He also did not have to accept our human limitations. In the earliest picture that I have of him, he is standing on a sidewalk in Texas, dressed in a Superman costume, staring fiercely at the camera with his cape swinging behind him, his two hands out in combat. He had set out in search of lonely neighborhood kids who needed help, even if it only meant being pushed on the swings.

  Most of his life appeared, from the outside, like that of any boy who grew up in Texas: the second oldest of eight children, married at twenty, the assistant manager of a Sears department store. But his four children were well aware that he was a superhero in waiting. He would regale us with stories, late at night. Though he would continue to pretend to the world that he worked in a department store, he would always wear something red—a shirt, a tie—a reminder to us that he was Clark Kent, hiding his powers beneath moderately priced men’s casual wear.

  To us, he could cast out demons. He could race into my five-year-old self’s bedroom and carry me off from a nightmare to another planet entirely.

  By the time his three oldest children had left for college, he had abandoned obscurity and entered into his public role as president of Catholic Charities in San Antonio. In a matter of years, he set out to do what he had signaled to us he would accomplish since we were children: he began to rescue people. He discovered that the elderly were dying of heatstroke in their homes, so he created a program to deliver fans door to door. His programs fed the poor, sheltered the homeless, and gave aid to pregnant teenagers. History grew bolder, and so did he, coordinating relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina sent thousands of homeless victims to Texas. In the meantime, he founded the nation’s largest resettlement effort for refugees without relatives, seeking out those at risk of death in Iran, Iraq, and the Sudan, in an act perhaps inspired by a Superman poster that had appeared in his childhood, when he was ten years old, urging children to be kind to refugees. Decades later, he helped find them refuge in our city, Baha’is and Muslims and Christians from worlds away, rescued from war or persecution, now walking dazed among the taquerias and Laundromats of San Antonio.

  During all of those yea
rs, I could not remember a single instance in which I called him on the phone and he did not answer.

  He continued to wear suits to work, but at home he could be found lounging on the couch in his Superman pajamas, for there was no need to hide his identity from us.

  And now this: father of fathers, grandfather of grandfathers, a superhero. Nowhere did cancer fit into this story. Sooner would the earth break in two.

  Frédéric, Joseph, and I caught a plane to Texas for my father’s first chemotherapy treatments. My father, sleeping on the couch, looked so fully alive, even with his hair beginning to fall out, that I could not fathom the tumors inside of him. He awakened and kissed me on the forehead.

  “You’re my beautiful little girl,” he whispered.

  At night, I wept in the dim light of my childhood bedroom, which my father had still kept, with my bed, my trophies, my chest full of letters. Frédéric took me into his arms. And out of the darkness, we became one, and conceived our second child.

  Sebastian

  Four months later, Frédéric, Joseph, and I returned to France for a six-month break, escaping into the house in the high Alps to rest. I was deep in the nausea and exhaustion of the second trimester, and there was relief in climbing high above the world, into a village where nothing happened save for the drama of cows and the memory of the war dead from nearly a century before.

  The baby grew inside of me, and as my belly swelled and the linea nigra appeared, Frédéric and I waited in the space between two spectrums of eternity, between my father’s test results in Texas and the returning sonogram from the doctor in France: five toes visible, a clenched fist, the beating heart of our second son.

  Across the world, my father fought a war: ingesting chemicals with names I could not pronounce, losing his hair and growing it back again, tumors swelling and melting. He had made me a promise—that he would be there to see the birth of his second grandson, even if it meant conquering death.

  So that is what he did.

  • • •

  In late August of 2010, a week before my due date, my father and my stepmother arrived in France at the chalet in the high mountains, with instructions from his doctor to rest. In his rental car, he had stashed red wine and a Superman costume for Joseph. Joseph immediately pulled it on and began flying around the house.

  On the last day of August, I was calmly soaking in the bathtub when I began to feel stabbing pains. I reasoned that they couldn’t possibly be contractions, because my bath was so lovely, so I continued soaking and reading my book. Eventually I looked at my watch. Felt the pain. Looked at my watch. The contractions were only a few minutes apart.

  “Frédéric!”

  He rushed into the bathroom. I held out my watch for him to see. We stared at it for a few minutes, as though that would somehow slow down time.

  Finally, I climbed out of the bath, threw on my clothes, grabbed the hospital bag, and handed Joseph over to my father before jumping into the car. He ran to the window and leaned over to kiss me.

  “Good luck, little girl,” he whispered.

  I was fully in labor as we drove down the mountain. I had forgotten that the Alps were so high. The road curved every few seconds, until a moving truck came into view in front of us.

  “Make him move!” I shouted at Frédéric.

  “How can I?”

  There was no room for passing him. I clung to the sun visor of the passenger’s seat and screamed. We turned corners, descending, descending. I breathed, screamed, breathed. The truck eventually pulled away.

  We sped all the way to the hospital.

  “Give me an epidural!” I begged the nurse when we finally arrived at the emergency room.

  She shook her head. “It’s much too late.” They moved us to the delivery room, where this time everyone was speaking French instead of Arabic, because I was destined to give birth only in immense pain in foreign countries, and in a haze of screaming and joy we brought forth our second son.

  He looked up at me. I knew him.

  “Sebastian,” I whispered.

  And we loved him. I had worried that, bound by the laws of matter in its finitude, I would never be able to love another child as I loved Joseph. How could I? Had I not used up every ounce of love that I had? Yet there he was, Sebastian, and the impossible miracle happened—that love is expansive and infinite, that the more you experience it the more there is of it, for here was a second child and I loved him just as much as the first, and I sat there in awe and wondered from what well it all sprang and how it was possible.

  That afternoon, my father stood at the door of the hospital room, holding hands with Joseph. Joseph ran to me, crawling up onto the hospital bed beside his new baby brother.

  “Be careful,” my dad cautioned. “He’s a little baby. He can break.”

  Joseph kissed him. I handed my newborn son over to my dad. He lifted him and cradled him in his arms in a way that I recognized I had learned, unconsciously, from once being cradled in his. In a single embrace, all of the promise and peril of life, all that could be loved and lost and gained back, was held in balance. And my father whispered to me, across generations: “You did good.”

  • • •

  The first instinct after giving birth to a child is the desire to bring him back home. But France was not home. It was easier than Nablus Road. But I missed the life that was ours.

  So two months later, we journeyed down the mountain, this time with our two sons, to return to messiness, to neighbors gossiping, to the bullet-wrecked sign of Nablus Road and a country between.

  Each time we returned to that broken city, it belonged to us a bit more.

  In Jerusalem, Frédéric paced back and forth, singing to his new son. Joseph grew up. He sat next to the window, looking down at the nuns’ garden, narrating to his brother, who lay on a striped blanket: “This is door, see? This is tree. This is bird. Porte. Arbre. Oiseau.” And so the world was created anew, and given names. And it was good.

  The Piano

  Not long after we returned to Jerusalem, we were walking near the New Gate in the Old City and came upon an old German upright piano called a W. Hagemoser, made in Berlin and with dark, almost black wood, sitting in the lobby of a music conservatory and marked for sale. Beside it sat another piano, so worn down that the bearded Italian priest in charge said he would give it to us for free if we paid the price to ship it to the house. The German piano was $1,000. I was so frightened of both of them, of the years of memories they contained, that I hesitated.

  “Sit,” Frédéric coaxed me. “Just try it.”

  I had not played the piano for a great many years, and now I heard the songs of my childhood emerging from beneath my fingers. I was taken back to afternoons with my father, sitting on the couch across from the piano when I was a girl, urging: “Play something for me!” And I would begin, in a ritual of how a little girl tries to tell her father how much she loves him in the language she knows best, closing my eyes with that seven-year-old amazement that I could feel my way through a song in the dark.

  When I finished trying the German upright, I turned to the free piano. The notes were tinny and worn out, and I could not bear to play for more than a few minutes before I returned to the dark wooden German piano again. I looked up at Frédéric. He nodded. There are a few times in life when you judge your own human value. We didn’t have much money, but I could not accept a life in which I would play the free piano—it felt too much like succumbing to a broken version of my own past. The woman at reception said that we could pay it off over a year, a hundred dollars every month, and for the next year I would stop into the Magnificat music school on the first of the month to pay off what I would imagine was a pedal, some keys, some strings inside the body of wood.

  It was the largest object I had ever owned, and the piano came to dominate our house. Everything in the living room was situated on the floor, including the Arabic-style mattresses that we used instead of furniture, and the piano towered over the
m, moving the house upward and bestowing on it a measure of grace. As the only European object in the room, it seemed an admission, after all of our years in the city, of who we really were. But for months, I would walk past it and refuse to play it.

  One morning, when everyone else was out, I sat down and began. I had stopped taking lessons when I was fourteen years old, when my family had become too poor to afford the luxury, so I had only memorized a few songs in childhood. I was surprised that my hands could remember the keys. I kept returning to the same melody, ashamed at the expanse of years passed, with the knowledge of one who grasps that it is now too late to acquire what might have been taken.

  Play something for me.

  I was thirty-three years old. For almost half of a lifetime, I had become a connoisseur of bracelets from the Ottoman period, antique hats, prayer beads that could be slipped into a pocket. The Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh recounted how his father, after he had lost their family home in Jaffa during the war of 1948, managed to sneak back across Israeli lines a few weeks later with a truck, to collect their furniture. When he arrived at the house, all of the furniture was still there. But he was so paralyzed by losing a city, a life, that he left everything where it was. At the last moment, he grabbed a statue of a Buddha from a mantle and put it in the car.

  Play something for me.

  I had tried to keep my attachments limited to what I could throw into a suitcase. But it was no longer in my power. I had two children now, and a husband who had climbed down a mountain for me, and a father battling cancer. Loss would come, one day or another. Those are the wages of love. There is no holding it at bay.

  After that, I would play every day after dinner. I played for Sebastian, struggling to scoot across the floor as his first months passed. I played for Joseph, who climbed onto the piano stool in his Superman costume and leapt down.

  And at night, when Joseph was asleep, I would whisper over his forehead the blessing: