A Country Between

by Stephanie Saldaña

  Every moment, after all, is a lesson to be learned, and one to be passed on. It had taken me too long to understand.

  But now I knew, and there was still a little time remaining.

  My father could barely speak. When he could, he asked the nurse for a Coke float. He took the first sip slowly, and a flicker appeared in his eyes.

  “You must understand,” he whispered. “This is not just a Coke float.”

  I nodded my head. I knew what he wanted to say: that there was childhood hidden in it.

  He gathered what was left of his strength: “Thank you so much,” he called out to the nurse at the door, his weak voice breaking. It would be minutes before he would find enough strength to speak again.

  I took notice. I would teach my sons. If we only have the strength for one prayer left, let it be gratitude.

  • • •

  When my father no longer had the strength to teach me, I tried to give him back some of what he had gifted to me instead. I sat beside his bed, and held his hand.

  There were monitors and tubes and a bag for his urine, machines to help his breathing, tumors in his lungs, a hell of violence and savagery upon a human body. I read to him from Winnie-the-Pooh:

  “What about a story?” said Christopher Robin.

  “What about a story?” I said.

  “Could you very sweetly tell Winnie-the-Pooh one?”

  “I suppose I could,” I said. “What sort of stories does he like?”

  “About himself. Because he’s that sort of Bear.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “So could you very sweetly?”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  So I tried.

  I looked up. My father, smiling faintly, had fallen asleep.

  Light fell in and out of the room. We drew the shades, opened the shades. For days it went on like that. My brothers and sisters and stepmother alternated staying beside the bed.

  Then, he disappeared. For two days his body was in the bed, but he was gone. He stared out the window with blank, glassy eyes. Nurses checked his temperature, but he did not recognize their comings and goings. The archbishop came to bless him. He seemed to twitch in bed but remained gone. My brother put Lois & Clark, a TV series about Superman, on the small television in the room and left it to play on a continuous loop. His favorite nurse walked in.

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked my father, and he shook his head.

  “Do you know who I am?” my brother Steven asked him, and he was silent.

  Then Steven pointed up at the television screen. “Who’s that?”

  “That’s Superman,” my father whispered.

  “Who’s he fighting?”

  My father coughed. “The Invisible Man.”

  “What does he look like?”

  My father looked up at his son, incredulous. “He’s invisible,” he answered.

  Then he fell back asleep.

  He was gone for hours. Awakened. I held his hand, and he pointed out the window. A bird perched on the windowsill. Light was falling outside. The physics of grace.

  “Look,” he whispered hoarsely. “Sunset.”

  • • •

  There are a few times in a life when you stay awake all night, watching someone sleep. The first night Frédéric and I ever slept in the same room, I had awakened to see him, bleary-eyed from watching me. “Where did you come from?” he asked. And I knew that I wanted to be with this man for the rest of my life.

  Joseph, on the night he was born. The light of the moon outside, and the vision of the orange trees, and my boy, my very own boy, sleeping beside me.

  Sebastian, in a hospital in France, with a wrinkled frown.

  The last night I spent with my father.

  • • •

  These are the magical hours, when time stretches out. You keep vigil. You recognize what is holy and unique in the one you love, all of the lives that existed before his and tumbled into making it happen, each body an entire country, and you stand in awe of it, and hold onto it while you can.

  In each of these, you memorize: hands, eyelids, barely open mouth, the steady pattern of breathing. But only with a child and with the dying do you feel that they are hovering between two worlds, so you try to look through them—to glimpse some hint of the eternity where they have been, or the eternity where they are going.

  Now and then my father awakened, whispered, “ice chips,” and I spooned them into his mouth. Then he slept. In the middle of the night, the nurse came and put on a mask to help him breathe, and I stayed in the low chair and watched the lines of his heart move up and down, just as I had heard the steady beating of Joseph’s heart as he emerged from within me, coming into the world from the other direction.

  • • •

  At six thirty the next morning, the nurse came in to say good-bye before the shift change. The hospital rules said that I had to leave for the next two hours. Then I would have a few last minutes with him before I had to leave for the airport to return to Jerusalem, where I would have a day to pack my bags before all of us flew to France.

  I held my father’s hand. “Daddy, I just need to leave you for a little while,” I said. “It’s the rules of the hospital.”

  The nurse studied me. “Are you the daughter who is leaving today to fly across the world?”

  “I am,” I answered.

  “You can stay,” she said firmly, so that I would understand.

  • • •

  Then we were left alone. My father asked me to open the shades so he could see the sky. I opened the shades, and the sky had not disappeared overnight, and that was something. I sat beside him and pulled out my computer, and I set it up on the tray across his bed.

  “I have something to show you, Daddy.”

  We waited until the film came on screen: my father in the hospital in France, standing next to a window flooded with light, holding Sebastian in his arms on the day he was born.

  Joseph’s voice was audible in the background, singing, and then he was visible, two-and-a-half years old, with his mop of blond hair, his body circling my father’s legs. In the film, my father was fully alive, his face flushed with joy, and he lifted Sebastian up from the bed for the first time and rocked him, just barely, back and forth in his arms. Sebastian’s eyes had not completely opened yet, and he looked up at my father, curious, blinking.

  “Isn’t he beautiful?” my father asked Joseph. “It’s your baby brother.” Joseph moved forward to touch the baby’s face.

  Then my father in the film turned to me.

  “You did good,” he said.

  In the hospital bed now, my father sobbed. “I didn’t know you still had that,” he gasped, and he was no longer just talking about the film; he was talking about that image of himself, fully alive, holding a child. He held my hand and pleaded, “They’ll have so many beautiful memories, won’t they?”

  “Of course they will, Daddy. I’ll make sure that they do.”

  And it did not matter anymore that that had been one of the last times he ever held Sebastian, that he had been so sick since then that he could not hold him in his arms, because now we would fill up the space with that single moment of holding, until it stretched into eternity, my father holding his grandchildren, over and over again forever.

  “Thank you so much,” he whispered.

  • • •

  My father died on a hot summer morning a week later, the day after the Fourth of July. They brought him home from the hospital, and my brothers and sisters lit fireworks above the swimming pool where he had once played Frédéric in a game of chess for my hand.

  I was in France when it happened. There was no time for me to fly across the world to be beside him.

  Instead, when the priest came to anoint my father, we said good-bye from across the world. We called on the telephone, and they put the speaker next to my father, whose eyes were closed, so he could hear us.

  Frédéric’s voice caught in his throat, so that he str
uggled to manage. “I know that on that first day I met you, I promised you that I’d take care of Stephanie,” he said. “So you don’t have to worry about that. It’s okay to go. I’ll take care of her now.”

  He handed me the phone. I looked outside. The two boys were playing on the front porch. The flowers were in full bloom. I whispered to my father the same words he had whispered to me as a child when I couldn’t sleep at night:

  “Close your eyes, Daddy. Now imagine a field full of tall grass, and flowers, and trees, and the sun is shining. Everywhere you look there are butterflies. Do you see the butterflies?

  “Close your eyes, Daddy. Now go to that place.”

  Sirènes

  The next year was our last year in the house on Nablus Road. The French nuns, who had always been planning on properly restoring the house, finally asked for it back again, and we could not say no.

  Every autumn we used to buy enough firewood to last us through the coming winter and beyond, but that year we bought no new wood. The wood that remained from the previous years would suffice. On the street, someone tried to speak to Joseph in Hebrew, and he answered, in English: “I don’t speak that language.” And I knew that he was growing up, for he no longer understood every language in the world.

  • • •

  In November of 2012, war broke out between Israel and Hamas in Gaza once again. In the past, the fighting had always been far away, but now Hamas was firing rockets into civilian areas of Israel, and the war that had felt at least slightly removed was finally coming to us. All day, the news lit up with alerts of rockets landing near cities: in Ashkelon, Sderot, Beersheba, as civilians fled to the closest shelters.

  On the third day of the war, I was sitting in my office at home when an air-raid siren began wailing through the streets like a phantom. A rocket was falling somewhere nearby—the first time that rockets from Gaza had ever targeted Jerusalem. All over the city, thousands of pedestrians fled for bomb shelters.

  I ran to the bathroom, huddled on the floor, and wondered where my sons were.

  • • •

  Downtown at the French school, Joseph’s teacher was announcing to the bewildered class of five-year-olds that they, too, must run and hide. There were sirens in Jerusalem, she told them. But there was a shelter beneath the building, and if they stayed together there was no need to be afraid. Joseph clutched the hand of his best friend, Ulysses, and with the mass of children, they rushed to the shelter and sat on the ground, waiting. A second siren cried out—another rocket falling nearby.

  I pictured them, somewhere across the city, crouching and shivering in the dark.

  That afternoon, Frédéric ran to pick Joseph up from school, but amid the frantic parents and alarmed children, Joseph remained calm. Frédéric, not wanting to frighten him, took his hand and walked him home.

  • • •

  The next day was my turn to pick up Joseph from school. I remembered the story of how, during the Second Intifada eleven years before, a suicide bomber had blown himself up in front of the gates of the French school. His severed head had flown into the air and landed inside the courtyard, among the children at play. It was hard to come to terms with ordinary childhood, marbles and jump ropes and arithmetic lived out in the midst of such possibilities.

  I arrived early, peering through the windows of Joseph’s classroom to watch him at his desk, attentive, working on the curve of his letters. At the sound of the bell, he jumped from his chair and fastened his oversized backpack to his shoulders.

  We made our way down the long hill toward home, holding hands. We had been walking for several minutes before he pulled on my arm and motioned for me to lean toward him.

  “Mom, did you know that yesterday, two mermaids came to Jerusalem?” he whispered, his eyes widening.

  “Two mermaids?”

  He clenched his fingers, his arms shaking with excitement. “And the teacher—she said that we had to run and hide. But that we didn’t need to be afraid.”

  It took me a moment. Mermaids. I remembered: in French, the word for “siren” is sirène, also the word for “mermaid.” When my son ran to hide in the shelter, he had thought that mermaids were heading toward the city.

  “And do you know what sound mermaids make when they call?” he asked.

  “What sound?”

  “Whoooooo! Whoooooo! Whoooooooo!” he sang out into the street.

  “Tell me again?”

  “Whoooooo! Whoooooo! Whoooooooo!” He lifted his arms in flight, raising his voice above the incessant honking of cars.

  “Whoooooo! Whoooooo! Whoooooooo!”

  We carried on down the crowded sidewalk, holding hands, walking against the line of traffic. I could not tell if the tears in my eyes sprang from sadness, or relief, or the love that wells up sometimes so that it physically pains the body. I imagined him in that dark basement, huddled with his best friend, Ulysses, whose name practically made him destined to live that moment, listening to sirens.

  “And why did mermaids come to Jerusalem, Joseph?”

  He shrugged. “You know, Mom,” he said, “the sea is not very far away.”

  The Great Tree

  Fall turned to winter, and the war passed. Log by log, we used up our supply of firewood. Outside, vendors sold sage leaves, as lemons and oranges came into season. The iced drinks for sale were replaced by sahlep, a sweet, steaming white drink once made of the root of orchid flowers, and Abu Hossam lined his stand with winter hats and umbrellas and scarves. I tried to take notice of every detail, knowing it would be my last winter in that valley of birds and miracles.

  One night in early December, I was kept awake by howling winds from a storm so strong that it shook the house. The windows groaned with the strain of trying to remain hinged. In the early morning, Frédéric rose from bed to make his tea, reaching the largest window just in time to see an incredible sight: the Great Tree from the inner courtyard was lifting from its roots, at that very moment, and crashing toward him. He ran. The tree collapsed into the courtyard below in a thunderous crash, crushing the pomegranate, orange, and lemon trees in its path before punching a hole in the side of our house. From the bedroom, I heard the impact and rushed to the window. Half of the trees from the garden below were gone, along with the leaf-laden boughs we had always lived among. It was as if, like Robert Frost wrote, “the inner dome of heaven had fallen.”

  For the rest of the day, great flocks of birds came to sit on the surrounding fence, looking down in disbelief, or perhaps homage, at the Great Tree that had sheltered them for a century, now fallen, a village gone. The next day, snow began drifting in the late afternoon and continued all night long, burying the streets and the fallen trees. The few standing orange trees were blanketed in white.

  I thought of my father. I thought of the monastery in the clouds of Syria, where Frédéric and I had fallen in love. I thought of all of those enormous things that came before us, which we could not imagine inhabiting the world without—and then they are gone.

  And yet the impossible oranges, covered with snow, remained.

  That night, I held my youngest son, Sebastian, a long time before I put him to sleep. When it was time to put Joseph to bed, instead of leaving him, I remained and found a place to rest beside him. There are those moments when we stay with our children in bed to comfort them, and then there are times when we remain because they comfort us. We could hear the wind howling outside through the space where the tree had once been, through the hole punctured on the opposite side of the house. For the first time, I was glad that we were leaving the house, because I could not imagine it without that tree.

  Joseph crinkled his brow as he lay in wait in bed. My little boy had grown up that year. Death will do that to a person. He had knowledge of things I had hoped I could withhold from him for a little longer.

  I held his hand.

  “Mom?” he said. His head was resting on his Spider-Man pillow. “When I grow up, I’m going to be your dad.”
/>   “What do you mean, you’re going to be my dad?”

  “When I get big, I’m going to be transformed into your dad. Because he’s dead, but when I grow up I’ll replace him, and then you won’t be sad anymore.”

  I felt a sob collecting in my throat. “You’ll replace him?” I asked.

  “Yes. And you will be my little girl.”

  We held each other, listening to the wind. He was right. It would all come full circle. One day Joseph would be my father, one day I would be his little girl, and he would watch over me when I was afraid, passing from one eternity to the next. One day I, too, would lie in a bed while he watched me sleep, and read to me from Winnie-the-Pooh. One day would be his time for returning.

  And I closed my eyes beside him, stunned by the enormity of all that was lost, and all that remained.

  Afterword

  “Tell me what you see vanishing, and I will tell you who you are.”

  —W. S. Merwin

  My dearest Joseph, three years have now passed since we left the house on Nablus Road, and nearly all that I described in this story has disappeared.

  You were five years old when we began packing up those eleven rooms. Over seven years, we had managed to accumulate mountains of trinkets we didn’t need—unnoticed because they were spread across so much space. It took weeks to empty them out.

  There it was: the image of your body, asleep in the carriage of my womb, mistaken for an illness that might kill me. The piece of paper, with lines marking your heartbeats, with the handwritten note: “No contractions yet.”

  The green-striped pajamas that your brother Sebastian wore on the day he was born.

  Frédéric’s notebook from India.

  Pour un moine, quitter à jamais son monastère

  ne peut être qu’un acte de foi, ou une fuite.

  For a monk, to leave his monastery forever

  can only be an act of faith, or of running away.