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

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