Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar (27 page)

The Christian Palestinians, who tend to be middle-class, love not only their bread but also finer pastries and cookies that imitate European styles of baguettes and sweet breads. This more bourgeois kind of baking has been brought to the Christian Palestinians through the French, Italian, and German religious orders that have played a role in the Holy Land since at least the Crusades. The cookies in particular are famous. But the core bakery experience for Palestinians is still the warm, pillowlike pita bread, or
taboon
, or the rugged carpets of braided Iraqi bread.

After we had spent about a half hour eating bread in the nineteenth-century grandeur of the old Jacir Palace hotel, the manager came to us and politely asked us if we were finished, as we might want to consider leaving very quickly. He said there was a large demonstration taking shape, and it was about to descend on the checkpoint in front of the hotel. With a grim, weary look, he politely explained that there was almost certain to be gunfire and violence. A waiter wrapped the warm bread in a cloth napkin and guided us to our car, which was waiting out front.

We set out from the hotel entrance, and literally ten yards behind us was the front line of the demonstration. I could see the angry and determined faces of young Palestinian men pushing forward with fists raised in protest. Many were clutching rocks. As we passed the Israeli border guards, they were just loading tear gas canisters into their weapons, and we heard the soft pop of the first volley as it lofted into the crowd, forcing them to disperse into doorways and cover their mouths and noses with kaffiyehs, the signature Palestinian headscarves.

In the next few weeks the intifada raged and reached new heights of violence that stunned us all. I was very worried about having Julie deliver the baby in Bethlehem, and Julie and I agreed that if there was any problem at the checkpoint when she was in labor we would go to a Jerusalem hospital without hesitation.

The monitor suddenly begins beeping, interrupting the quiet of the hospital room and the stirrings of our memory. Gabriel wakes up for a moment and grimaces. His face crumples into a frown. Then he is crying and saying, “It hurts too much. Make it stop!”

At one point, Gabriel keeps repeating, “I can't do this anymore.” There is no feeling more powerless than that of a parent who can't console a sick child. Many times I had seen this in the field as a reporter. There were the scenes of Palestinian children wounded in the Israeli military's response to the intifada. And there were the Israeli children screaming in pain in the chaos of the emergency rooms in Jerusalem after a suicide bombing by Hamas. In refugee camps in Kosovo, and in the grimy hospital wards in Iraq, and in rural villages far from any medical care in Afghanistan, I had seen far too many scenes of kids suffering in war. It's always heart-wrenching, but when it is your own child in pain, it is all-consuming. It is the only thing that matters in the world. And I am promising myself never, ever to forget this when I am on a story and see a parent going through this. At Children's Hospital, literally every floor is a level of relativity for anyone with a sick child. Yes, Gabriel is in pain, but we only have to stop in on the cancer ward or visit the trauma unit to realize just how lucky we are to be struggling through a burst appendix. Still, when it's your kid, all relativity is out the window
.

The morphine drip is wearing off, and the real pain of what Gabriel is going through is tearing through him again. We ring for the nurse, who hangs a new IV drip for him with more morphine. Slowly he calms down and eventually fades back to sleep. There are more long silences as we watch him sleep, his eyes darting back and forth in some troubled dream sequence he's having. He looks
afraid and uneasy in his sleep. I am crying, but then I watch his face grow more peaceful as the morphine envelops and comforts him
.

On the afternoon of December 8, 2000, Julie was in labor and we were on our way once again to Bethlehem.

We had worked out an arrangement with a Catholic priest at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, which is perched on the hilltop just above the checkpoint. We arranged that we would check in with him when we were on our way. The priest informed us that the checkpoint was quiet and there was no fighting in town. We confirmed this with our dear friend Gerry Holmes, at the time the ABC News bureau chief, who happened to be reporting nearby. So we were on our way, and we sailed through the checkpoint.

As Julie settled in at the hospital, we realized we had made the rookie mistake of coming a bit too early. But at this point, there was no turning back. I felt strongly that we should not take any chances. So Julie stayed at the hospital and waited for the contractions to intensify. There was a whole different etiquette for men in the delivery room in the conservative Palestinian culture, and I felt more like an outsider on this birth than on the previous two. Mostly, I smoked cigarettes with an on-duty doctor. We stood in the doorway of the entrance to the hospital and watched a machine-gun battle between the Palestinian village of Beit Jala and the Jewish settlement of Gilo just across a valley. Tracer fire lit up the night, and the thud of tank fire sounded like distant thunder. Julie's room was in the basement of the ancient stone building, and it felt safe and fortressed. We told Julie it was quiet outside, but I have never been able to get anything past Julie, and she looked very suspicious.

“It's gunfire, isn't it?” she asked.

That night I finally checked in to the nearby Bethlehem Star Hotel, with lots of jokes from colleagues covering the story about how there was plenty of room at the inn. When Julie was ready to deliver at last in the early morning of December 9, I was there at her bedside. Gabriel Jerome Sennott was born at 7:35
A.M
. He was healthy, weighing in at eight pounds, five ounces.

He had a Palestinian birth certificate issued to him in the hospital, and he would soon have an American passport to back up his American citizenship. The passport listed his place of birth as “Bethlehem, West Bank.” But it listed his country of birth as “_____.” The space was simply left blank, a legal document that revealed the fact that Bethlehem still did not belong to a recognized state. Palestinian statehood was a matter for what was called “final status” in the peace talks. So Gabriel's birth documents seemed to defy the land's narrow notions of tribe and nationality and even religion. He was listed on his birth certificate as Christian because in Arab culture a child's religion is determined by his father's. But just across the checkpoint he would be defined as Jewish, because under Jewish law his mother would determine his religion. We want our children to love everything about who they are, and we find some mystical meaning in the idea that Gabriel was born in a place that straddles the three faiths of the Holy Land, and in a sacred city that was not yet defined as belonging to any one nation.

After his birth Julie's hunger quickly came raging back, as she was nursing again. Julie's favorite meal at the Holy Family Hospital was
musakhan
, the delicious Palestinian chicken dish served atop
taboon
bread and a layer of caramelized onions and crunchy, sticky rice scraped from the bottom of the pan. There was also a simple, delicious lentil soup, which had the nuns' distinctly French flavorings of lemon and thyme. For dessert there were rice pudding and dried apricots. And, of course, with every meal there was warm
taboon
and pita bread. With breakfast it was served with honey and orange marmalade.

Gabriel wakes up, and he is smiling. It is six days in and he is looking much better as the antibiotics slowly take hold. It's Friday, and when the hospital chaplain, Rabbi Susan Harris, is making the rounds she stops in to see us. She asks about Gabriel and we begin talking about his life and about being born in Bethlehem, and she is very intrigued. She returns later that day with a loaf of challah bread for Gabriel. It's something she does for children on the ward; the loaves are
donated by Rosenfeld's Bakery in nearby Newton. She calls the challah bread gifts a “big, cosmic hug.” The bread is still warm and perspiring in a plastic bag as she gives it to Gabriel. He smiles and begins eating. This challah is the first thing he has been able to eat in days. He devours much of the loaf, breaking off one piece of the braid at a time and smiling, and we can see that he is finally getting through his ordeal. Rabbi Harris leans over him and offers a blessing, saying, “Be who you are and may you be blessed in all that you are.”

On Christmas Eve that year of Gabriel's birth I took his two older brothers, William and Riley Joseph, to Shepherds' Field in Beit Sahour. I was just trying to get them out of the house while their mother wrapped their presents and foraged for a few hours of sleep with the newborn Gabriel. As we drove through the West Bank we saw a shepherd tending his flock. For the boys, all the Christmas Nativity play imagery was always very real and tangible, a part of the landscape in which they lived. We pulled over and walked up into the olive grove to see this shepherd tending to lambs. He was using a wooden staff to knock olives off the branches of a gnarled set of ancient olive trees. The lambs eagerly munched on the olives that landed amid tufts of dry grass in the chalky hills. It was an image straight out of the Bible and an experience I will never forget.

I often found myself questioning these experiences in the context of my faith. I knew it wasn't the religion that pulled me toward them, but I definitely did feel a strong connection to the place, to understanding its reality and trying to get beyond the iconic stained-glass images in the parish church in the Boston archdiocese where I grew up. I wanted to see the living, breathing reality of the land out of which Christianity grew, and the life of the Palestinian Christians who were part of a two-thousand-year continuum of the faith and whose presence was dwindling rapidly in the land where the faith began. I had come to realize that Bethlehem, Jerusalem, the Galilee, and all the datelines of the New Testament were caught in a modern reality that was not unlike the reality two thousand years ago, a place of
occupation and violence and a political struggle to control sacred space. I was drawn to the research for my book because of the great layering of history.

Down in Bethlehem that year there was a dark mood. All of the musical and cultural events of “Bethlehem 2000,” which was to have been a boon to tourism and the Palestinian economy, were canceled. The traditional Christmas lights strung along the roads leading up to Manger Square were all turned off as a protest by Palestinians against the Israeli-imposed closure of Bethlehem. We stopped at a bakery near Manger Square and bought
taboon
and Christmas cookies. We as a family were celebrating the birth of Gabriel. But the town of Bethlehem was simply not joyous on this Christmas. It was sad and tragic, and we could feel it. As the violence reached a fever pitch in the spring and then into the summer, we knew it was time to leave, so we moved to London, where I had a new assignment for the
Boston Globe
.

A year and a half later, I was back in Bethlehem. The events of September 11, 2001, meant that I was reporting mostly from Afghanistan. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was raging, and the
Globe
had asked me to return to cover the events, as they were centered on an Israeli military siege of Bethlehem. The Israeli tanks surrounded the Church of Nativity, and Palestinian Muslim militants were holed up inside the basilica with several priests and Christian shopkeepers being held inside the church. It was a thirty-eight-day siege that held the world transfixed. I was covering the story from the edges of Manger Square, and I smelled the bakeries and the warm aroma of
taboon
bread mixed with the conflicting burned smell of cordite from Israeli tank fire. The two smells—warm bread and cordite—mingling together is now my strongest memory of Bethlehem.

On the seventh day, a sleepless, terrible week has finally passed and Gabriel is going home from Children's Hospital. He is doing much better, the antibiotics having finally gained the upper hand against all the toxins in his system. He is slowly realizing that the pain is subsiding. He is beginning to trust that he
feels better. When we get Gabriel home, he is treated like royalty by family and friends who've rallied around and helped us get through this rough patch. His brothers are joking with him and making him laugh again. His grandmother, aunts, and uncles are all doting on him. Our yellow Labrador puppy, Bella, sleeps at the foot of his bed. We all love him more than ever and love having him back home, making us laugh as he always does. Julie is cooking for him now. Simple, good food. She brings up bowls of oatmeal with local maple syrup. And she prepares French toast, his favorite meal, only this time it is not rubbery inedible squares like those at the hospital. This time it is made with delicious challah bread from a local bakery and eggs that come from our neighbor's hens. The food is real and it is delicious. It is as simple as eggs and bread and cinnamon, but it is good and warm and Gabriel is devouring it and slowly getting his strength back. He surprises us by asking for more French toast. He is on the mend, and, as it turns out, the thing he wants more than anything else is something so simple and meaningful and a part of his life. He wants bread
.

JON LEE ANDERSON
has written for the
New Yorker
since 1998, reporting from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Somalia, Cuba, Liberia, and many other countries. He has also profiled a number of contemporary political leaders, including Augusto Pinochet, Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hamid Karzai. Among his books are
Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, The Fall of Baghdad
, and
The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan
. In 2009, he won an Overseas Press Club Award for a story about life in Rio de Janeiro's gangland.