Mummies of Jerusalem

We're on the phone with the Glammy as we drive out for dinner on Sunday night. The four of us: two dwarfs, the Pea, and me. We were all ready to go and then the Pea crawled to my bag, whipped out the bottle of white wine and cracked it onto the tiled floor while sitting back on a shard of glass which punctured the gnocchi dough thigh. The dwarfs got to work massaging the wine lake into the rug and crunching more glass around the house. So we're late for dinner but happy to be going out. We FaceTime the Glammy on our way. She's in the US now: found a job and in the process of losing another husband. But it's great to talk and she laughs at me - her face on dashboard as I drive - you are a crazy Mamma taking everyone out at night!' The Lozenge trills: 'But you shouldn't be at work. You're Arab and it's EID!' 'I know habibi (dear) Laurie but they don't have days off for EID in the states.'  And if Trump wins, not any time soon, either.

We have dinner on a balcony with some wonderful friends from Kosovo. It's a balmy evening and we smoke a hubby bubbly pipe, eat lasagna altogether, drink wine, study the Arab tiles on their floor, and ponder if this was originally an Arab house, now consumed by West Jerusalem.

We do the skip through the dark thing again back home and the Lozenge sings: ' I can use up some of my energy from tomorrow, and the bit left over from today.' I almost sleep drive, home. I am weary from physical endurance and I feel like Mummies must feel a lot, everywhere in the world. Particularly when they're on their own a lot. I look back as we draw into the garage. Two sleeping dwarfs, heads propping each other up in a head to head book-end style without the books in-between. The Pea also in dormouse cottage lolling alone in her seat covered in biscuit crumbs. I do four trips to the car and back putting each small creature into bed - though the Lozenge almost feels like I'm carrying one of myself - he is so big and tall. I peel off clothes, forgetting the teeth just for one night, and make one final trip for the bags which fortunately don't need tucking in or undressing. I collapse into bed.

Monday is first day of Eid so no school. I was part of the team at the school campaigning for Muslim pupils to have Eid holiday, as Christian and Jewish children have their holidays, so here we have it. 2 days off when I've just started work and really quite a lot of it to do. But Eid al Adha is the festival of sacrifice afterall: the holier of the two eids muslims celebrate each year - commemorating Ibrahim's willingness to sacrifice his son.

Our area has a lightness in the air. The emphasis is on eating, family, and spending time and money, together.  Teenage girls wander the sticky pavements in squeaky new white Converse trainers; metal shop shutters are pulled tightly down while the community goes to ground for a few days. I stop at a flower shop for a bunch of lillies, a young boy gives the Pea a flower of brightest fuschia and ruffles her hair. 'Kol 'am wa antom bekhayr'  I say - an Arabic greeting for birthdays and festivals alike. Eid has been good this year, the man in the shop tells me.

The Israel museum beckons with a gang of friends - large and small. Picasso drawings for larges and an interactive communications exhibit for the smalls - or both for both. We get waylaid with the 'Mummies of Jerusalem' and while Rashimi contests these cannot be real Mummies as they are not covered in bandages, I realise though I'm not covered in bandages either, I fit right into the Mummies of Jerusalem exhibition anyway.  My brain embalmed with constant questions and smalls-talk; my body as stiff as a sarcophagus from the midnight kinder-shifting.

We walk down a wide avenue with a Rodin statue and Rashimi smacks his bottom; wafts of lavender exude from the garden, the dead sea scrolls housed on our right. I've never seen those I think to myself. ''Mummy, what is rock. Mummy, why can you sort of see through the moon in the daytime? Mummy why does water make your hand wet? Mummy...Mummy...Mummy..both dwarfs are at it in my two ears. Their questions come as fast as two mouthfuls taken in without chewing. They start another question before they'e finished the first. 'Mummy I have more bones than you and Laurie but the Pea has more than all of us, right? Mummy, because small people have more bones than big people. And Mummy does Master Kwaigon have the force?'

Yes I am a Mummy of Jerusalem. I create myself an invisible sarcophagus shell around my head and think still, quiet thoughts. We find ourselves back at the Mummies again as Rashimi is fascinated by them more than anything else in the museum apart from the video of the real-life beating heart. 'Mummy, but that's not a real heart because it's not a heart shape.' Khaled our friend says something about these Mummies not being Egyptian ones. He's Egyptian so I expect he'd know, I think. I don't get around to reading the information board. But a while later I manage to inspect the nano bible through half shut eyes for a few seconds. It's the world's smallest bible, on a microchip. (W.H.Y?) I look, briefly at a page of a dead sea scroll and try and work out if it's Hebrew writing.  This Mummy leaves the museum not altogether wiser about anything than before she entered. But at least I have literally 'seen' the scrolls.

I watch the boys eating a large slice of Israeli cheese cake I've paid for. It costs about £6, and wonder if that can count as dinner or if they'll be hungry again when we get back.

The following day we decide to go the beach for the final Eid-off. We're all four in the kitchen making hummus which we've agreed will be our contribution to a group picnic. The Lozenge is balanced on a chair operating the whizzer, slopping olive oil over the work surface; Rashimi is ripping open razor sharp lids of chick pea cans; the Pea rams me with her walker in my shins - the boys are safely un-safely teetering on their stools, so free from ramming incidents at least.  She runs over a splodge of hummus and a plastic pretzel dragged from the playroom, now lodged under her wheel makes a scraping sound as she walks. Radio four is unintelligible for the decibels of our kitchen so I turn it off leaving a hummous finger print on the ipad, as Rashimi inadverently spatula splats some hummus onto my top.

St Grace is here, and then has gone - 15 Sri Lankans are on a pilgrimage here from Jordan and are coming around for a cup of tea so she whips off to get them from the Garden Tomb, where some, but not all, Christians believe Jesus was buried and the rock moved. I'm now half naked - the hummus top in the washing pile - and I wonder if Sri Lankans have a problem with semi-nudity in adults. The dwarfs are still completely naked. We laugh when we remember the last time she had a visiting pastor from Sri Lanka and the Lozenge came waddling out of the loo with his pants round his ankles asking me to wipe his bottom when the pastor was half way through a group prayer. I half miss her smooth presence, as smooth as the way she handles a mop or a brush or a baby.  And I want to wait to see her Sri Lankan pilgrims on their trip from Jordan but it's 9.30 and the hummus is made, carrot batons chopped, cold beer added for midday attitude ajustments and the Pea is looking sleepy in her walker.

I heave everybody, and myself, into the car and I receive a text from St Grace saying: 'sorry madam there still hear in tombs.'

Not such a bad plan, I think. Next week I might be wandering about the tomb too. A nice cool and quiet place for a Mummy of Jerusalem.

Taking Sides

While I have moments of missing J so keenly, I sit in a trance or pace the house, not knowng where to put myself. My Grandmother used to eat her dinner off newspaper when Grandpa was away, to save the drag of washing up one plate. And though I have to watch out not to eat a few Tuc biscuits followed by a Twirl for dinner; on the whole we're okay. Each street around us houses a friend. 'Keyf Jowzek?' (How's your husband?) asks my friend Marwan in the 'everything' shop, piled up to the ceiling with wares. 'Baghdad. Haraam.' (Baghdad, What a shame), people lament. The Armenian hairdresser pops out of his shop, his mouth full of hair pins. 'Anything you need. Really - you know where to come,' as I wheel past with the Pea.

In our world this week - in our uncomplicated bubble hovering over much a more complex reality - the main worry is that the star wars costumes and light sabres may have been forwarded to Baghdad by the diplomatic postal service. Though perhaps a light sabre is the very thing for J: for the force. With a thick Iraqi dialect to contend with in his work, and a life empty of distraction.

But all is not okay around us. Shaded by the superior hell of  Aleppo or Yemen, the State of Israel can continue to build illegal settlements on land that is officially Palestinian and bully the Palestinian people into submission unhindered. A greater regional conflict is just what the more sinister side of the State of Israel (becuase there are many, many Israelis who do not support this) needs to get on with what they came for - a whole country of their own, without the Palestinians getting in the way.

It's so easy to become inured to the situation here when you've lived here for a while. It's important to get out and see it as often as you can. And as internationals we can mercurially move around the way that locals from either side, cannot so easily, or safely.

This week I head up to Qalqilya, in the northern West Bank with Mark - the sculptor I've been filming with - to visit an eye clinic with St John Eye Hospital. Mark is visibly moved by what he sees. While we drive up the winding road, one of the doctors shows Mark a map of the West Bank showing the settlements. 'They're almost like a brown cancer stain in a scan of the human body,' says Mark. 'Yes, and they're growing, un-treated, even encouraged,' the doctor replies. 'There are maybe over half a million settlers in the Palestinian territories now,' he continues. 'They all have one IDF soldier guarding them to keep safe, and they are taking all the water, and using the roads, that we are often not allowed to use ourselves.'

Map from PeaceNow.org

The Palestinian populations scattered between these hilltop land grabbers are suffering from diabetes, depression, each compounded by the limited movement. It's difficult to get a permit to reach Jerusalem - though one way is a medical permit. The doctors refer 10 patients in the outreach clinic the day we visit.

But it's easy to ignore it when you're cut off from 'the other'. So easy. And also for internationals such as me: busy with jobs and juniors and just getting on with things. You can forget to put your head up and realise what is being eroded: a civilisation and a nation of people being slowly and assuredly squeezed. The life out of, the air out of, the houses out of, the land out of, the water out of...them and their country.

A young Palestinian man is shot dead by Israeli police while bringing home food, baby clothes, a grieving mother recounts. 27-year-old Mustafa Nimir, was killed early one morning this week, when Israeli forces showered the vehicle in which he was travelling with live fire. The Israeli police claim he and his cousin were attempting a car ramming. But eye witnesses deny this.

This is one story of many, many others.

Many locals here are calling this an ongoing 'Nakba' - referring to the 'catastrophe' when the Palestinian people were forced out of their land in 1948 when the State of Israel was created. The inhabitants of the West Bank and East Jerusalem are regularly subject to house demolitions, eviction orders, search operations. 83 Palestinian young people have been shot since the beginning of the year in the Bethlehem district. The same is happening all over the West Bank.

This is what an IDF commander, known as 'Captain Nidal' recently said to the young men of a refugee camp of Palestinians near Bethlehem: ' 'I will make the youth of the camp disabled. I'll make half of you disabled and let the other half push the wheelchairs.'

BADIL, the resource centre for Palestinian residency and refugee rights explains: 'These threats indicate that these actions are not accidental or isolated incidents, but rather result from a systematic Israeli military policy aimed at suppressing resistance, terrorizing Palestinian youth, and permanently injuring them and/or causing significant damage to their physical and mental well-being. The explicit threats by the Israeli army leadership show the willingness to commit criminal actsand raise significant concerns about the adherence of the Israeli forces to the tenets of international law.'

'We must always take sides,' said Ellie Weisel, Nobel Peace Prize Winner and holocaust survivor. 'Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.'

'An injustice somewhere, is an injustice everywhere.'

I often ask myself which kind of Israeli would I be? The one who puts her head above the parapet and says what she will not stand for? Or the one who just gets on with things and would rather not think too hard about it?

And as internationals we should be asking ourselves the same question.

Saja and Yazan

https://vimeo.com/181801625

The important and wonderful work of St John Eye Hospital for Palestinian children.

Daddy diet - week one

The dwarfs, at the end of the day, after I've concocted them three meals, sometimes four, have a habit of asking for warm milk (in a beaker which takes me at least ten minutes to clean and put together) and a bowl of dried banana or a platelet of fruit. Tonight was a bad night as I was threadbare from the day, and the day before that. And the Lozenge must have sensed it somehow as he followed me into the kitchen, naked, on his scooter and said sheepishly, 'Mummy, no rush with the fruit.' Then as he scooted out he turned to me and said a little more quietly, his head down,'Mummy. Do you miss Daddy? Because I do.' And scooted out again.

The Daddy diet has begun, as J begins his first seven week stretch away from us.  The first of a year's worth of these. He's in Baghdad; we are in Jerusalem. We're used to random-combination-destinations but this one is a wierd one. His lack is my overload, his silence is my noise, his solitude is my endless companionship. Mostly of dwarfs. But as Tom Hanks said recently: 'There is big difference between loneliness and solitude'. In my mind the two are as different as starvation and hunger. One is a deeper need that can't be answered with simple company or food; the other is a knowledge that everything is alright and a little pang of a reminder to enjoy the feeling and use it well, before the situation changes. ie. your husband returns, your friend comes to visit, or you have food on your plate.

As J works on one big mission, my missions are multitudinous. The dwarfs, the pea and I all have our routines, but I've noticed that through our intense togetherness, we've also begun to leak into each other's lives more than ever. Since J is not here, my life takes on more of a dwarf-friendly theme: they stay up later with me, as we're invited by friends to eat and drink on weekend evenings. I'm flanked in the darkness by two dwarfs on scooters, a pea in a pram as we wheel through the darkness back home, the call to prayer sounding under the starlight. And I can find myself of a Sunday morning eating nutella on toast roaring with laughter with them, watching Alvin and the Chipmunks: Road Chip; or trying to stifle a sob on E.T. when he leaves forever, pointing to the little boy's head and saying: 'I'll be right here.'

Our lives and our flesh are interlinked in our small oasis in the middle of one of the more troubled cities in the world. The physicality of dwarf and Pea presence, both trips me up and supports me. J has none of this, and the seven weeks of absence must be in this sense harder for him.

The dwarfs are most of the time my allies - their conversation sometimes deep ('Mummy, God is the guard of the world' or 'Mummy if all the people in the whole wide world, died, would that be the end of the world. And if so, would God begin making it all over again?' from Rashimi) between naked wrestling or Pea wrangling. 'She is the most loved, and cuddled and stroked and pummeled and sucked and occasionally kicked or dropped-by-mistake, baby sister. You guys are going to be so fine you know - you'll swim the river, you'll wrestle the crocodile and it'll all be good,' J says as he leaves us.

And I also have my other allies - so many friends around, and Marwan in the local shop on the corner, whose shelves are stacked so high in his tiny store he has to flick the cereal down with a long stick so you have to duck to avoid flying Cheerios. Marwan is my friend. He sells cereal, salami and Leffe Blonde.

We have our moments, also. When I signed up for this year of separation, the Pea wasn't moving. Now we have a constant refrain. 'Hang on, where's Petra?'

It's as though the Pea is on wheels, and she doesn't answer when we call. Now we need Pea patrol as well as everything else.

'Mummy - she's crawling down the path to the gate!'
'She's got a mouth full of fir cones Mummy'!' as Rashimi shoves a grimy hand into her mouth to pull out the dribbly brown bits.
'She's chewing the loo brush!

Or worst of all, tears of fury as 12kg of human shaped gnocchi crushes a Lego masterpiece.

Before he left, J gave us a beautiful chess/backgammon set made in Syria, so we'd have something other than Alvin and his merry 'munks to focus on while he's away.  The Lozenge and I play chess (we're teaching ourselves on youtube which is time consuming and intense) so Rashimi gets bored and rearranges the pieces or drops them on the floor. 'Look - I've knocked off some of your prawns and your ponies,' says Rashimi, cackling with laughter, looking for a rise. Normally he gets one from a Lozenge and I look down as the Pea squashes a bishop into one cheek, the other side already packed with draughts pieces. More tears. I study the mother of pearl on the chess board and wonder where the Syrian hands are now that set the tiny pieces into it.

When we're in the house together, there is constant, constant conversation, and I sometimes have to pinch myself to make sure I listen to every single bit - becuase it's all important, though all incessant. I almost switched off this morning while slicing into a newly baked fruity loaf, re-heating porridge, packing snacks for school and feeding a Pea a sticky spoon of mango in-between.

But luckily this morning I switched back on in time to hear the Lozenge's vignette on Gene Wilder's death. 'Willy Wonka, Mummy?' 'You mean he's dead?'  I said: 'Well - the actor who played Willy Wonka died. Because he was very old and he was ill.' A small silence. 'But you know what, that is really clever because what they do is they make the film with the Willy Wonka man in it, the one who's just died, and then they put it in a DVD, so then, so then he will stay there forever! Even when he dies, then he doesn't go away.' A six year old's way of explaining being preserved in Celluloid. Gene - you're with us. In our cupboard under the telly. And it's really nice to know you haven't gone away.

If only we could keep Daddy under the telly too.

Brotherhood and the Pea's first milestone