Madama

Just now I did a spinning back kick in the apartment kitchen and a dirt clod came flying off the sole of my shoe, landing on the counter beside the sink. The tiny earthen companion had followed me all the way from the Nablusi countryside where I had unwillingly picked him up near a village named Madama.

Actually, I have been shedding bits of countryside here and there for the past ten hours. Earlier today, in an aborted attempt to clean my shoes I started scraping them off in front of a little store owned by the family of one of my students, who had invited me to visit him in Madama. He grinned and said in a mock-serious tone of voice, “Brian, this is the entrance to the shop… it should be cleaned, not dirtied.” I stopped immediately, of course. We went to one of his friends’ house where I surreptitiously rubbed a few crumbs of dirt off against a gray stone wall shortly after taking tea and coffee on the rooftop before a magnificent view of Madama and its surroundings. But naturally I dumped the vast majority of my footwear hitchhikers at the earliest possible convenient place: the beginning of the paved road back to Madama and the end of the dirt road that lead me into and out hillside fields thick with olive trees, ancient stone walls, and mottled sunlight sieved through spotted cloud cover. May my mind reside in the calm of the Palestinian countryside evermore.

As I recall it, the walk from the village was occupied primarily by a comfortable intermittent silence. My four companions occasionally broke out into eager exposés highlighting some local oddity or minor wonder: here the wild brother of the lettuce plant, stranger to farm and field, cool to the taste; there a low upright stone called 'The Throne' on the cusp of a sudden precipice; here a hole, one meter squared, one foot deep, chiseled into solid rock to hold rainwater for fieldworkers to drink; there the blossoms and fruits of an almond tree; here a docile turtle hunkered under an awning of wild grass; 'do you have turtles in California?'.

But most of the time walking through the countryside, along the northern slope of a rich valley, was spent in silence, and my eyes wandered freely between sky and earth. On the opposite slope and the valley floor, the dark brown trunks of olive trees stood out starkly against the light pastels of underbrush and topsoil. Patches of shadow flitted across the earth, stragglers from last night's storm, and a breeze blew down from the northwest—fresh, clean, rejuvenating. "Is it beautiful? Is it beautiful, Brian?" they asked me repeatedly. "Yes, yes. It is." It reminded me of parts of California, those semi-deciduous regions in the foothills of great mountain ranges, just between the pine forests and lower climes.

"Do you see that?"—quarries in the distance, the color of sandalwood, dug into the mountainsides—"There is good stone from these places. Once the people of that town were rich because of the stones, but now Israel has built a new road between the quarries and the town. It is forbidden to cross."

"Do you see that?"—a long narrow vale snaking into the opposite valley side, inlaid with small dark green fields—"There is a hole there. Deep deep deep. Tourists used to come look at it. It does not end. Impossible? Yes. But this is only something they say. It is not real.”

In the spectrum of existence there are times, and for me they are many, when one feels so overwhelmed by the sheer and inexplicable beauty of life; this was one such instance. Maybe it was like the feeling you get from being in love, or feeling at home someplace, or watching an infant in his mother’s arms, or from noticing for the first time that the season has changed. Truthfully I didn’t know how to describe my feelings, except to say again, “Yes, yes. It is beautiful.”

We stood quietly on a stone outcropping for some time.

“This is Palestine. This is our land. This is for Palestine. Do you agree?”

I do. And I told them so. Still every time I concur with some bold statement of Palestinian nationalism I simultaneously feel as if I have betrayed better judgment by not also advising constraint, compromise, and cold rationality in the pursuit of an independent Palestinian state. But in a place like that, it was easy to see how better judgment is thrown to the wind and in its place are sown the seeds of loyalty to and love of country.

By the time we trekked out, a thick layer of soil clung to my feet, augmenting my height by a full inch. I suspect a great deal of it remains with me even now.