Foreign Correspondence (23 page)

I had wanted Cohen to be a brave Zionist warrior, when all he’d coveted was a quiet suburban life just like the one in Sydney that I was so busily wishing away. Even after the determined ordinariness of his letters, I’d continued to wish drama upon him. A day or two earlier, I’d been ready to sign him up as a shadowy secret policeman or a remorseless spy. I studied the real Cohen—the shy banker slumped contentedly beside me on
the sofa—and set him free at last from the heavy burden of my imaginings.

There wasn’t much more to say to each other. As I rose to leave, I mentioned I was heading on to Nazareth, to try to find my other long-ago pen pal. Cohen wrinkled his brow. Although Nazareth lies only a couple of hours’ drive from Netanya, Cohen had never ventured there. When he said so, my eyebrows rose in surprise. Israel is tiny—the size of New Jersey, one fortieth the size of my Australian home state of New South Wales. I couldn’t imagine living a lifetime in such a small place and not exploring every inch of it.

But Cohen merely shrugged. “Why would I go? I don’t know anyone in Nazareth,” he said. “Aren’t you afraid to go there, a woman alone?”

Why should I be afraid? Nazareth, after all, wasn’t the West Bank. It was part of Israel. Its Arab citizens had been Israelis since 1948—a year longer than Cohen’s own Yemenite parents.

Yes, he nodded, that was so. “But still, they are Arabs.”

Still, they are Arabs, and when I turned my car westward at Haifa and headed into the Galilee, I felt I had crossed an invisible border. In that region of Israeli-Arab towns and villages, the roads suddenly got rougher, and soon I heard a dull thunk as my right front wheel dropped into a gaping pothole.

In the proclamation of Israeli independence in May 1948, the Jewish leaders called upon the Arab inhabitants of the state of Israel to “play their part in the development of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship.” I knew that proclamation by heart; it was part of the arsenal I had unleashed so long ago on my Palestinian schoolmate Monique, in our history class arguments.

While Monique didn’t have her facts tidily marshaled in
those days, she had been right when she replied that Arabs who stayed had never enjoyed full and equal citizenship. Instead, they were placed under military rule until 1966—required to get a pass from the army to travel from one part of their own country to another.

Even now, the contrast in government spending between Arab and Jewish areas remained stark. And that contrast had just cost me a front tire. My lame car limped to the side of the road and I got out to inspect the damage. I barely had the trunk open to search for the spare when the very first car to pass by pulled over. The young Arab driver was the first of three who stopped to offer aid. It was an instant reminder of the reflexive hospitality Arabs show to strangers. If one had to have a flat tire, this probably was one of the best stretches of road in the world on which to have it.

On the way into Nazareth the road narrowed and wound as the hills rose abruptly, covered in a honeycomb of tightly packed houses. Everything about Nazareth was unmistakably Arab: the style of the buildings, their dense asymmetry, the arabesque winding of the narrow streets. The city’s status as a Christian pilgrimage site was evident from the churches, convents and abbeys in almost every block. In the 1920s the Arabs of the town were ninety percent Christian. Since then, Muslim Arabs had moved in from the villages, and many Christians had emigrated. Nuns’ habits shared the streets with Muslim veils, and the occasional minaret of a mosque popped up like an exotic plant in the forest of church spires and crucifixes.

I found the pilgrims’ hotel where I had booked a room. It had been impossible to get much information about Nazareth hotels from the Israeli tourist desk at Ben Gurion Airport. The young clerk had offered me a detailed, rated list of inns and B&Bs in the nearby Jewish suburb, Nazret Illit. But for establishments in the old Arab town itself there were just names and
phone numbers, no ratings. I soon discovered that in the hotel I’d chosen the emphasis on the word “pilgrim” was clearly on the “grim.” My bed was hard and monastically narrow, the shower cold.

In the morning I woke to the unmistakably Arabian aroma of cardamom-scented coffee. Fortified by a strong, sticky cupful, I set out with my map. I figured that Nazareth’s numbered street plan should make it easy to find the address.

But if Nazareth once had an orderly grid system, years of weaving in extra alleys and laneways has turned it into a spaghetti tangle of streets where numbers seem to have been assigned at random. By late morning, as the sun crept higher, I had trudged in circles and ventured down blind alleys until I’d become a dusty, sweaty mess.

Defeated, I backtracked to the tourist office and threw myself on a chair beneath the air conditioner. The smiling woman behind the desk showed no interest in the address. “Maybe I know the family?” she said. “Then I can tell you where they live.” Nazareth, with a population of more than 70,000, operated like a small town. Although the young woman didn’t recognize the family name, she directed me to a taxi company whose drivers, she said, “know everybody.”

At the taxi kiosk the manager got on the radio and out of a blur of static managed to find a driver who knew my pen pal’s family. Soon we were outside the gate of a tall building more like an apartment block than a house. Beyond a jasmine-draped courtyard an external staircase ran up the side of a layer-cake structure, each level looking slightly newer than the one beneath.

When I rang the bell a dapper, elderly man emerged from the ground floor, smiling broadly as if I was the exact person he most hoped to see. I barely had the words “Australia” and “Mishal” out of my mouth when he had an arm around me, propelling me inside, insisting on paying the twenty shekels I
owed the cab driver, who then refused to accept the fare because he was a friend of a friend of the family.

“Come in, come in, meet my wife,” said my ebullient host, almost dancing on the balls of his feet. “I’m Mishal’s father, of course. We remember you—he wrote to you all those years ago. We can’t allow you to stay in a hotel. You must sleep here in our house—you are like my daughter while you are here in Nazareth. My daughter lives here of course. All my children do. You can’t buy land in Nazareth; it’s very expensive, so we stay all together here and the house grows up with the children. Mishal is the oldest—but you know that already. Four married, three grandchildren and one more on the way. So you will stay here with all of us. We have a saying in Arabic: mountains can’t meet each other but people can.”

Mishal’s father hadn’t paused for breath. “I’m just back from traveling myself, in Germany, and I had some wonderful hospitality there. Somebody stole my bag at the airport and the Jewish community gave me two hundred deutschmarks. I could speak to them in Yiddish, because I learned it growing up in Haifa. You don’t speak German, I suppose? Or French? My German and French are better than my English.”

It was hard to imagine how his other languages could be any more fluent than the rapid-fire monologue he’d just delivered.

“But what are we thinking? We must call Mishal and tell him that his old friend is here. And we must give you something to eat, drink. You must be hungry.”

His wife, smiling, gently told him that she had already called Mishal, who was on his way home. She also already had set down a Coke and a plate of fruit in front of me. Fragrant coffee bubbled on the stove in a bright kitchen where the bench space overflowed with fresh-picked olives, ripening tomatoes and glossy eggplants.

The sitting room—full of heavy furniture that Mishal’s father had French-polished to a deep sheen—was dark. Mishal’s
mother suggested we pull our chairs out to the small vine-covered courtyard. The scent of jasmine made me homesick for Sydney.

“Mishal has no children, after twelve years of marriage,” his mother confided abruptly. In Arabic, the standard, mannerly reply to this news is
“Allah kareem.”
The words literally translate as “God is generous,” but in this society of tight-knit extended families, the meaning is entirely the opposite. I suppose his mother felt it necessary to blurt out the information so that I wouldn’t embarrass Mishal by asking.

A few minutes later a tall man bounded up the steps. At forty-one, his hair was silvery. Like Cohen, he had a slight paunch. He was covered in a fine mist of sawdust. Mishal was a carpenter.

He grabbed my hand and pumped it. “It’s great to see you,” he said, as if it were only a week or two since we’d written to each other. Like me, Mishal had lots of pen pals. There was a boy in Malaysia, a girl in Germany. And his interest in the wide world seemed to have been inspired by his father, just as mine had.

Reaching for a panama hat from the hall stand, Mishal’s father excused himself with a slight bow. “I hope you will forgive me: I have to get the newspapers before they are all sold,” he said. “One has to know what is happening in this world, after all.” He straightened his silk tie and made his way, slowly but somehow jauntily, up the steep hill to the main street.

Mishal smiled. “Every day, he has to read every newspaper, he has to watch all the news programs. Now that we’ve got satellite, he can watch CNN and all the German news as well. Me, I don’t like politics. I like to work, make money, go places.”

Mishal’s thirty-two-year-old wife worked too, packing sweets for grocery stores in her brother’s small warehouse in the village of Cana, the site of Jesus’ first miracle. Mishal asked if I’d
like to go and see the church there before he picked her up from work. On the way he had to call on some clients, and asked if I’d mind tagging along.

As a reporter in Arab countries, I’d often found myself swept up like this, welcomed midstream into the routines of someone’s daily life. We drove through the warren of old Arab Nazareth and up toward the new Jewish suburb, Nazret Illit, that sat on the ridgetop like a sentinel. As we entered the newer town the maze of cracked sidewalks and twisting alleyways was replaced by a tidy geometry of new apartments and wide, curbed streets. I wondered if Mishal resented this place, which after all was built on land that the overcrowded Arab city might have used for its own expansion.

But in Israel’s confusing way, nothing was quite what it seemed. For Mishal, Nazret Illit was a rich source of clients. We climbed the stairs to a brand new apartment where Mishal was finishing off a kitchen for a family of Russian immigrants. The apartment’s owner greeted him warmly. She was Christian, like Mishal. As Mishal measured counter tops, she explained that though her husband was born Jewish he had lived all his life in Russia as a Christian to avoid discrimination. It took only one Jewish grandparent to be eligible to migrate to Israel, and many Russian families made the move because prospects in the former Soviet Union looked grim for Jews and non-Jews alike. In many cases the Jewish grandparent was the one member of the family who elected to stay behind, while the Christian members took advantage of the only chance they would ever have to move to a country that welcomed them.

“Many of these people are my clients now,” Mishal said. Such families often had more in common with fellow Christians, even if Arab, than they did with the Jews.

As we headed out of Nazret Illit the road narrowed again and wound through fields of wild fennel and olive groves. In the distance lumpy Mount Tabor rose from the plain, a sudden
geological thumbs-up sign. As we drove into Cana, the road to the old church was crowded with pilgrims. There were groups from Brazil, clusters of African-Americans, a Japanese couple and a band of Italians. We picked up Mishal’s wife, a petite, soft-spoken woman with a generous smile, and headed home.

When we returned, Mishal’s father was glued to the news on CNN. “Arnett!” he cried as the correspondent’s face filled the screen, reporting from Bosnia, where NATO jets had just bombed a Serb hospital. “America
shamouta!”
he cried.
Shamouta
is Arabic for whore. “In Sudan, Turabi is killing Christians for years,” he said, referring to the endless war against the Sudanese Christians who refused to live under Muslim laws. “Why doesn’t America do something for
them?”
Watching him argue so passionately with the TV reminded me of my own father, and how much I missed all the irascible energy his illness had drained away.

Mishal and his wife signaled me to follow them up the outside staircase to their own apartment. Their flat was about the same size as Cohen’s but opposite in atmosphere. Almost every square inch of wall was covered with landscape prints, huge glossy photographs of gladiolus or pale oak shelves built by Mishal to support an array of knickknacks: artificial flower arrangements, pharaonic souvenirs from a holiday in Egypt, a Greek Orthodox silver-framed icon of the Virgin, a miniature water pipe and a sea of snapshots of nieces and nephews.

After dinner of hummus, olives, salad, and eggplant stuffed with peppery beef, we rejoined the family on the terrace, munching roasted pumpkin seeds in the warm evening air. Mishal’s father had moved on from barking at CNN to berating the Arabic newspaper. On the front page was an account of the murder of a Jewish man and the stabbing of his pregnant wife in a West Bank settlement. The newspaper used the word
shaheed
, or martyr, to describe the murderer. “They think they go
straight to heaven, these so-called
shaheed
. They think they get paradise—beautiful ladies, a stream of water and a nice view. Ha! When you’re dead
halas
—it’s finished. No ladies. No view.”

That night I slept in Mishal’s spare room—what might have been the child’s room. As if to underscore that absence, a huge blue plush bear sat in one corner, still wrapped in plastic. I fell asleep to the familiar street sounds of Arab cities: the gentle murmurs of the late night promenaders, the raucous honking of overused car horns, the lonely crow of an insomniac rooster pealing from a neighbor’s rooftop coop.

I woke with a start to a loud voice singing. It took me a moment to recognize the Muslim call to prayer. For almost six years, when I was a Middle East correspondent, that call had been as familiar to me as the beep of an alarm clock. Lying there, I reflected on how my years writing to Mishal—the surprise of finding more of a kindred spirit in him than in Cohen—had made it easier for me to take the Middle East job when it was offered. His letters had humanized the Arab world and taught me to look beneath the stereotypes and the scary headlines. He was the prototype for the many Arabs who had become my friends.