Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

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