“Gabe,” she finally said. “Please.”
He was silent for a while. She knew she was hurting him, that he wanted to be part of this. You can’t, she didn’t say. You don’t understand what it’s like. Darling Gabe, born and bred in white suburban America.
He spoke quietly. “This isn’t the time to be wandering across the world alone.”
Not alone enough.
Her truth shamed her; the decision came after she’d found out about the pregnancy.
Palestine was something raw in the family, a wound never completely scabbed over. Her grandparents rarely mentioned it. Manar’s plan of visiting was always derailed by something: her grandmother’s illness, meeting Gabe, Zain’s graduation.
Only the children discuss it, during the Beirut summers. For years, Manar nursed an image of herself, dusty, solemn, walking onto Palestinian soil, squinting in the sun. So when she peed on that stick and a little blue cross appeared, marking her to this new, alien life, that image flashed before her. She couldn’t explain it to Gabe. She had to go now; she is as alone as she’ll ever be again.
When she told her grandfather about her trip, he said only that she should be careful.
“You don’t know what can happen.” Manar heard static for a second, the line faltering from Amman to Manhattan.
“Does Teta want anything?” Even asking the question made Manar flinch, thinking of her grandmother in her state: convinced the maids were spies, that Saddam was coming back.
“Alia,” her grandfather called out. “Manar asks if you want anything from Falasteen.” A mumble. “Falasteen.” There was a long pause, then her grandmother’s muffled voice, punctuated by a sharp, rare laugh from her grandfather.
“She says, whatever they ask you, give them hell.”
In the late afternoons, Manar wanders through the Old City, finds cramped teashops to sit in, listens to voices haggling over the price of sandals and soap.
Every weekend she packs her worn backpack, walks east to the bus station near Damascus Gate, boards one of the buses to a different city. Tel Aviv, Haifa, Hebron. And the West Bank—that concrete wall a menace, always jolting her freshly when it appears—Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus.
These places she has read about, circles on a map, suddenly emerge, smelling of fruit and car exhaust. I’m in Ramallah, she marvels to herself. This is Haifa. Her pang for Palestine had always been an amorphous thing. It was a hat rack for all her discontent. But suddenly Palestine is real. It is filled with people who have her hair and voice; people live here, she realizes stupidly. They wake under this sun, celebrate anniversaries, march at funerals, watch settlements and checkpoints multiply. While she was busy sleeping with American boys and writing essays about the diaspora, there were people over here being Palestinian.
At checkpoints, she shows her passport, waits for the click of fanged metal doors; the Israeli soldiers always nod her through. She tries to keep her face impassive, to communicate scorn in her walk. The passport is my key, she writes Zain once.
It is difficult to capture this trip in her e-mails. Certain evenings she sits at the Internet café near the hotel, at a loss what to write to friends and family and Gabe. She uses words like arresting and eye-opening—how to explain the rows of teenagers in uniforms, the women sandwiched together in checkpoint lines, the confusion of being hit on by Israeli men, the way every Palestinian she has met has been kind but pitying, as though aware She is not like us—and clicks Send.
A part of her had fantasized that the trip would restore in her some faith, a land to which she’d feel unflinching attachment. She wanted to be shaken to the core. She’d envisioned reading Darwish in seaside cafés, kneeling to gather handfuls of soil into her pocket.
But from the beginning, nothing has felt as it should. When the plane intercom crackled on, a man’s voice murmuring, We are landing in Tel Aviv Ben Gurion International Airport, everything seemed to accelerate. It all happened in minutes, the flight attendants plucking headphones, fastening overhead bins, the Hasidic man across the aisle rocking with prayer. Manar pressed her forehead against the window, craning to see the strips of ordinary land. From the air, it could be anywhere—grids of buildings, highways spidering like veins between the swaths of reddish earth, the slate blue of the Mediterranean flicking against the shoreline.
Her mind was strangely blank as she watched the landscape. She clasped her purse.
The passport control lines were long and slow. Manar watched American-looking families smile up at the officers in the glass booth, lugging their diaper bags and backpacks. A trio of tanned girls giggled at something a security guard said. Passports flitted between the officers’ fingers like birds, the pages flipped through, stamps steady and final. When it’s your turn, Seham had told her, be polite. Avoid eye contact. Smile.
When her moment came, Manar slid her passport under the glass and waited. Her officer was thick-browed, a younger Pacino.
“Manar,” he mused. He rifled through it, the pastel, faded stamps on the pages, paused at a recent one. Even through the glass Manar recognized the Arabic lettering. Beirut. The man narrowed his eyes toward her.
“Arab?”
He directed her, in accented English, to a waiting room, a cordoned-off space with a mounted television, where a heavyset female officer took Manar’s passport and told her to sit.
Several other people sat in plastic chairs lining the dirty windows. They’ll have you sit with the other Arabs. Across from Manar, an older woman fanned herself with a newspaper, jiggling her leg and cursing quietly.
“Every time. Those dogs.” When an officer appeared, asked her to follow him, the woman spoke to him in Hebrew, then, switching back to Arabic, muttered, “Of course, Your Majesty, of course.”
The television played a news report in Hebrew, footage of a fire somewhere. Manar waited. Her legs were cramped from the long flight but she was afraid to stand and stretch, then ashamed of that fear.
After nearly three hours, a young officer appeared in the doorway and said her name. He looked twenty. She rose, her heart pounding, the leather purse strap sticky between her fingers. The man led her down a drab-looking corridor, several doors ajar.
“In here.” The room was windowless, painted the shade of milk. There was a long table, a metal chair on either side. Manar sat, the man barely glancing up as he shuffled through a file of papers, her passport clipped to the top. “So.” He looked up. “Why are you here?”
They want to make it hard, Seham had said. That way, we don’t want to come back.