The questions were predictable, repetitive. He asked about her family, where she grew up, her life in New York. There was a smattering of acne around his mouth; she could tell from the way his fingers hovered over his jawbone he was self-conscious about it. In spite of herself, she felt a tug of sympathy.
“And your father?” he asked.
In Connecticut, writing bad novels, she wanted to say, but jokes seemed unwelcome. “In America as well.”
Where had her mother been born? When had her grandfather left Nablus? Where did her mother live now? Why were there so many Lebanese stamps in her passport? Had her grandfather ever returned to Israel? What precisely did her grandfather do in Amman?
The interest in her grandfather was disorienting. Her tall and quiet jiddo, always clicking peppermint candies against his teeth when he sipped tea. During the summers, entire evenings could go by without him speaking.
When did her grandfather get a Jordanian passport? Who purchased the house in Amman? When had her grandmother left Nablus?
“I don’t know,” Manar said to the officer over and over.
He looked at her with disdain. “You don’t know?”
He brought her water and crackers. He asked her to write down where each grandparent was born and she paused, uncertain. Nablus, she wrote for her mother’s parents and, beside it, a question mark. Was it Nablus? That was where they left, she remembered. Had there been somewhere before that? She racked her memory. A faint nausea began to trickle over her like a raw egg.
Pick your battles, Manar, she could hear Seham saying.
But she was hot and tired and thirsty and was already speaking, her voice shrill and angry: “My grandfather’s in his eighties. He hasn’t been here”—she couldn’t bring herself to say Israel—“in decades. What’s the point of these questions?”
The young man looked up sharply, a frisson of something—contempt, distaste—rippling through his eyes.
“It’s security, miss.”
He left her for a while, twenty, thirty minutes. She could hear voices in the hallway, someone laughing. The floor was made of ugly diamond-shaped tiles. She began counting them, then gave up. Finally the door opened. The officer set her passport on the table.
“Your purse,” he said. “I have to search it.”
Everything was excruciatingly slow, her own fingers lifting the purse strap from her lap, his fingers opening the flap, pulling out lipstick, vitamins, several sticks of gum. She watched him rifle around, finding the zippered pocket. She could feel the jagged metal beneath her own fingertips. He pulled out the bundle of letters. For a moment, neither of them spoke.
“This?” He looked up at her sharply. He unwound the twine. “What are these?”
An image of Zain’s face, trusting, floated up to her. The lines upon lines, an entire history in words. She imagined her grandfather’s story in this man’s hand, her jiddo’s tidy rows of writing. His life. They’d take the letters. Linah and Zain would kill her.
“Miss?”
Help me, she whispered silently and something stirred, miraculously, leaping through her esophagus, her stomach darting, splitting her until she bent over. Vomit streamed from her mouth like relief, hot and toxic, splattering the ugly tiles. She could feel the man’s shocked eyes on her. Her breath was ragged.
“I’m pregnant,” she said triumphantly.
The officer looked irritated, as though they were playing a game and she had cheated. Bullshit, he seemed to be thinking, but was too afraid to say it. She could see his mind whirring, imagining potential articles on the Huffington Post, lawsuits, miscarriages.
Not worth it, his shrug said. He dropped the letters back into her purse, pushed it toward her with the heel of his hand.
He stood, nodded behind her, toward the door, the long hallway, the passport lines, the rows of cabs, the land.
“Go,” he said.
Nothing quite as dramatic happened after the airport, but the feeling of things being off has persisted. Everywhere she goes, she feels surplus, unnecessary. Her first time in the Old City, she was fascinated by the Wailing Wall. She froze, watching the throngs moving like water, toward the wall, away from the wall. A group of young people near the entrance wore uniforms. The female soldiers were unsettlingly beautiful.
In every guidebook she read, there was the same truism—the magic of Jerusalem. How you would walk through it and breathe history. How you could feel it in the stones. Reading the books, Manar felt a rising excitement. Would she touch it then, finally? That parched, grasping part of herself, thirsty to feel something that would link her, in some ancestral way, to the world?
But Al-Aqsa had been a disappointment, the Holy Sepulcher as well. Though each marketplace was perfumed with spices, each mosque framed with beautiful calligraphy, she felt uninspired. Sometimes she felt a swell as the sun set over Jerusalem, the city alive with its low, intimate thrumming. But the moment was always interrupted by something, a motorcade whizzing by, a child’s cry, her own phone ringing.
It reminded her of vacations as a child. She prepared for cities the way she prepared for exams, reading about them, researching history and sightseeing, and something in this erudite approach left her floundering when she actually got there. Before a trip to Quebec or the Grand Canyon or London, she’d take out books from her school library, devour images of mountains, skyscrapers, fill her mouth with borrowed adjectives (stunning, colossal, breathtaking, otherworldly) so that when she finally arrived, there was nothing left to see, nothing left for her—already prepared for the awe—to say.
Nablus was the biggest disappointment of all. She’d expected to feel kinship. Though her grandparents’ stories were infrequent, this was where they grew up, where they had met and wed.
Manar had formed an image of Nablus: an expansive, generous land peppered with olive groves, valleys between yellow hills. In one of the photos, her younger grandparents grinning into the camera, she could see slivers of indigo sky, bunches of wildflowers.
But there were no wildflowers. The bus from Ramallah was musty, cramped with the sweating bodies of middle-aged men. Outside the window, swaths of land blurred by, blanched hills dotted with trees. Biblical, Manar thought, of the groves, the occasional cluster of goats or donkeys.
A prickle of claustrophobia as the bus drove into Nablus—those endless cliffs and hills, the vast rising at either side. It made her feel caved in. Landlocked.