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  Copyright © 2017 by Stephanie Saldaña

  Cover and internal design © 2017 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Connie Gabbert

  Cover image © Imgorthand/Getty Images

  Back cover image © Oleg Zaslavsky/Shutterstock

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. —From a Declaration of Principles Jointly Adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations

  This book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over a period of time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been re-created.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

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  Names: Saldana, Stephanie, author.

  Title: A country between : making a home where both sides of Jerusalem collide / Stephanie Saldana.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks, Inc., 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016021329 | (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Saldana, Stephanie. | Americans—Jerusalem—Biography. | Jerusalem—Biography. | Jerusalem—Description and travel.

  Classification: LCC DS109.86.S235 A3 2017 | DDC 956.94/42054092 [B] —dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021329

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Part One: In Which an Angel Appears on a Train

  The Angel

  A Monastery in November

  France

  A Game of Chess

  Passing Storms

  Jerusalem

  Part Two: Nablus Road

  The Valley

  House Hunting

  The Bishop Sent Us

  The Opening and Closing of Windows

  Borders

  Spies

  Abu Hossam

  The Man of the House

  Palimpsest

  Seasons

  Invisible

  Bird Country

  Friday

  Part Three: The Child in Bethlehem

  A Test

  Joyeux Noël

  Mary of the Shattered Ones

  Umm Yusuf

  Linea Nigra

  Ze Christmas Tree

  The Hopes and Fears

  A World Made New

  Part Four: The Magical Hours

  The Things of This World

  Memory

  The Language of Childhood

  Lessons

  War

  Hospitals

  What Passes and What Remains

  Part Five: Sirens in Jerusalem

  Afternoons in Eternity

  An Unexpected Battle

  Sebastian

  The Piano

  Knocking on a Door

  The Love Stairs

  The Invisible Man

  Sirènes

  The Great Tree

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  In loving memory of my father.

  And for Joseph, my firstborn son.

  “Tanks are perishable. Pears are eternal.”

  —Milan Kundera

  Author’s Note

  This is the actual story of the seven years I spent living in a neighborhood just outside of the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. I have chosen to change many of the names of individuals in order to protect their privacy, but all of the characters are real people.

  Jerusalem is complex, and I make no claim of providing a comprehensive view of the entire city, nor even of the entire neighborhood. I have only attempted to write about a single street that took hold of my life and of all of the worlds contained within it.

  Part One

  In Which an Angel Appears on a Train

  “Gabriel garde l’anonyme.”

  —Radio Londres

  Dear Joseph,

  It’s morning. Outside, helicopters are circling over the city. Every now and then, we hear shots of tear gas or stun grenades. Last night, you looked up from the small, square frame of your bed and asked: “Mom, is someone popping balloons?”

  I will not be able to hide this from you much longer.

  Someday, you will want to know why your father and I brought you into a world of such violence. You will wonder why you have memories—and perhaps even nightmares—of cities that have disappeared and people who you will not meet again. You will want to know about the world that is now gone, but that is part of you.

  This book is my attempt to answer those questions.

  If I tell you of the time leading up to your birth, it is because I believe that all of us contain what happened before us, that this is our burden and our gift. You are formed of disappeared places and disappeared men. Your heart is composed of the beauty that survived them and was endowed to you when you were born. You are part of what remains: a miracle, with arms and legs.

  This, then, is the story of how you were born. I could begin it seven years ago, when I gave birth to you in a hospital in Bethlehem. But I should begin it much earlier, on a morning in India, when an angel appeared to your father on a train.

  The Angel

  The man was sitting in a window seat of the train parked in Mumbai Central Station, dressed in his civilian clothes: linen trousers and a tan button-down shirt that seemed designed intentionally to make him disappear into any object behind him. Outside, the remnants of a morning monsoon were saturating the earth, weighing the leaves down on their branches. On his way to the station that morning, he had watched children crawling beneath plastic sheets to shield their bodies from the onslaught, an entire family taking shelter beneath a parked car. But now the rain had stopped, just as he had boarded the train, surprising him the same way it had every day since he had arrived—a flood that came suddenly and seemed to never end, then halted just as suddenly, making way for a space of light to filter through the clouds.

  Resting on his lap was a notebook he had brought with him on his journey from Syria. And on the first page, the words he had written that morning:

  Pour un moine, quitter à jamais son monastère

  ne peut être qu’un acte de foi, ou une de fuite. />
  For a monk, to leave his monastery forever

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

  His name was Frédéric, and he was thirty-two years old, a fact that had not escaped him two weeks before, when he had awakened in his spare, monastic room in the desert and packed his single bag to leave it.

  He did not know if he was leaving for two months or for the rest of his life, so he was uncertain of what to bring with him. There was a kind of discipline to what he piled into his bag that morning: two wooden icons, one of Jesus and one of Mary; his journal; his prayer beads; and an envelope full of love letters written in my hand. Linen shirts and trousers, then his monastic robe, which he folded and placed at the very bottom of the pile. And that was all. Into the emptiness of that room—converted from a goat’s pen and overlooking the valley below—he had abandoned all the rest: several flutes, Arabic dictionaries, boxes of tea, candles, card-sized pictures of the saints, a French bible, a Quran in Arabic, and the spaces of air that contained the sleep and prayers of the previous three years of his life.

  Then he descended the flight of 350 stairs that connected the monastery to the valley, to meet a car that was waiting to take him to Damascus, where he would catch his flight to India. The following morning, in the cheap hotel in Mumbai, he would pass the hours carefully recording in his notebook the names and dates of the monasteries that would receive him in the coming weeks, places where he had introduced himself, in the letters he had sent in advance, as a novice monk traveling on pilgrimage, though he did not feel like much of a novice monk any longer, and this was some strange pilgrimage.

  It had been six months since he had stood across from me, in a Syrian desert valley north of Damascus, and said, “I do not love you in that way,” as a man only does when he loves you, in that way.

  At the time I had been a graduate student in Damascus, twenty-eight years old, taking up no more space in the world than a small rented room in a house in the Christian Quarter, where I passed my afternoons studying Arabic verbs and the Quran. But on the weekends, I often traveled to Frédéric’s monastery in the middle of the desert, climbing the 350 stairs up the side of the mountain to pray. The monastery, suspended on a cliff over the desert, with a chapel adorned with medieval frescoes of the saints, was the most mysterious place I had ever seen, and it was easy enough to understand why monks had been coming to pray in the caves around it since not long after the dawn of Christianity. For someone like me, an American who had grown up Catholic but found myself swept into the Islamic world, into a country overrun with refugees from a war in Iraq that my own country had started, the monastery was also an escape, a place where I could be invisible: a piece of home.

  The monastery, Deir Mar Musa, is a Syrian Catholic monastery, in ruins for centuries but finally restored in the 1980s, now standing like an unexpected pearl in the middle of the desert. As an Eastern Catholic Church, it marries the traditions of the Catholic and Orthodox rites. The Catholic liturgy was held every night in Syriac and Arabic, with prayers sung out by a community of monks and nuns whose families had likely lived in the region since the dawn of Christianity. Throughout any given year, thousands of pilgrims—both Syrian and foreign—trudged up those stairs in search of something even they could not quite pinpoint. They stayed for an hour, a night, a week, or sometimes months at a time. They were joined by thousands of Muslim visitors, who came after their Friday afternoon picnics to visit with the monks and nuns, take in the scenery, and pay tribute to a shared cultural heritage that dated back centuries. It is like no other monastery in the world—the ideal place for a spiritual, wandering man who spoke every language with the marks of other languages, and had not ever quite found a home.

  It was there that I first met Frédéric, standing in the courtyard in his gray monastic cassock, imposing at over six feet tall, his hair a mess of curls, waiting to pour arriving visitors a glass of tea. He introduced himself in a European accent I couldn’t place. It was not often that I came upon men from Europe dressed in monastic robes in the midst of the Middle Eastern desert, and there was something about him that piqued my interest. From then on, he was always there when I arrived at the monastery, waiting for me at the top of the mountain with a pot of tea.

  I sensed something both wild and self-assured in Frédéric; he carried himself apart from everyone, yet at the same time drew everyone to him. In Syria, where he should have been the most familiar person to me, I had no idea where to place him. He was extremely thin without being frail, his hands bore the marks of working in vineyards and harvesting honey from bees, and he spoke English with what I finally discovered was a French accent—English that I couldn’t place as either American or British because he had picked it up during his years traveling alone in India. He spoke Arabic peppered with English and French for the words he didn’t know; in fact, every language he spoke seemed to carry a trace of some other language, so that he seemed to be from everywhere and nowhere all at once. He had a particular way of speaking so that you were never quite sure if he was teasing or serious, and he was never quick to clarify.

  His was a working monastery, and as my visits continued we often found ourselves sweeping floors or hanging laundry together, two strangers speaking among dirty dishes and ghostly sheets draped above the pale white stones. He had spent his years before the monastery traveling around the world, and he told me stories of India and Pakistan and Iran—travels he spent searching, not in the way of one who is lost, but with the intensity I later recognized in scholars who would go to the ends of the world to find a missing fragment of a text or a buried inscription that might shed light on a story partially told. One day, when he was twenty-nine years old, he arrived in that monastery in the clouds, in the middle of the Syrian desert, and sensed that it contained the something he had been searching for. And so he had, rather simply, remained.

  Frédéric entered the community as a novice monk and kept bees, milked goats, and learned to tell the story of the ancient frescoes that decorated the Byzantine chapel. He arose with the morning sun to pray in Arabic and Syriac, took long walks in the desert, and learned the monastic art of patience, waiting at the top of those stairs for whoever might come—for in the desert tradition of the Middle East, any stranger who arrives might be an angel, just as, in a story kept by Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, the angels of God arrived at the tent of Abraham one day, disguised as men, bringing news of what was to come.

  “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers,” the Letter to the Hebrews warns, “for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

  So he remained for three years, passing arid summers and snowy winters, building a hermitage where he could pray in solitude near the caves beyond the monastery, fasting once a week, memorizing the goat trails through the surrounding mountains in his sandaled feet, until he felt himself becoming part of them. On one occasion, a journalist came from Italy and, finding Frédéric in the desert, took his photograph. He then proclaimed that he had found the last of the real desert monks.

  That was around the same time I first met him. I didn’t think that I had found the last of the real desert monks. I felt that I had, in the oddest of places, come upon a friend.

  We were an unlikely pair—two strangers in an unknown place, his arrival by way of the French Alps, mine from Texas. Yet there was something familiar in him. I had also spent much of the last ten years traveling from place to place, as a writer and a journalist threading through dozens of countries: walking across Spain, living for a year in China, another in Beirut. I knew what it was to contain an entire life in a suitcase. I too had been drawn again and again to that monastery in the desert, a kind of anchor in a world in which so much seemed in motion. There was comfort in a monastery that had lasted more than a thousand years, that was made of stone. Though I spoke of it to almost no one, save for the monastery’s abbot, I was struggling to make sense of my place in a Middle East that was tumbling into war, and I also thought that I might have ha
d a calling to become a nun. My weekend trips to the monastery were far from idle: I was considering whether or not, when my graduate fellowship finished at the end of the year, I might climb to the top of those stairs one last time and stay.

  That spring, as we sat across from each other in the candlelit chapel, I confessed to Frédéric that I might spend my life there. He had already guessed.

  “I have never thought that you have a calling to be a nun,” he told me bluntly. “You don’t believe in resurrection. You don’t love your life.”

  He accused me of using a monastic vocation to run away from the world. His words stung with the bitterness of being true.

  • • •

  I had long struggled with depression, through a string of failed relationships, and my many years of living abroad had been as much about learning as they had been about grounding myself in realities more chaotic than my own fractured life. There was comfort in contrasting my own brokenness against problems much more severe than any hardship I had suffered. But there was a grace in my life that I refused to see. That spring, I took Frédéric’s words to heart, and I set out to discover resurrection. In Damascus, life became lighter somehow. I searched for the hope I had been missing—not in a monastery in the clouds, but on street corners, among strangers, in shafts of light that fell around the Umayyad Mosque. It came slowly: beauty I had never recognized before.

  I continued traveling to the monastery, and Frédéric and I spent many afternoons together, speaking about nothing much at all. Then one day, when we were doing the dishes together in the cramped monastic kitchen, I looked up at him and thought that perhaps I could continue this, doing dishes with this man, for the rest of my life—and not because I would be a nun at a monk’s side.

  That was when he said it: I do not love you in that way. As a man only does when he loves you, in that way.

  We wrote letters to each other, he from his monastery, I from my room in Damascus. For his thirty-third birthday, I brought him a bag of the season’s first peaches and the gift of a single pale blue, hand-blown glass. I kept one exactly like it in my room in Damascus. And as the days passed, we filled our glasses with water in the morning, and again in the evening. And I waited.