Our Elsewheres: Excerpt from An Old Carriage With Curtains

He turned right into the narrow pass, Khal al-Ahmar was behind him now. Having veered off the fast road, he found himself facing the wadi. He was wrapped in the strange energy of the place, lost in dark overlaps of severity and astonishment, overtaken by something like a deep mercy under everything that folded with assurance over the broken rocks and downslopes marking the dark course of the river.

A narrow road stretched through the wadi, twisting in elevation above the river and the stone walls that follow its edges. Green merged thickly out of the darkness. Bushes, silhouettes of trees and small thorny brush rose out of the chasm, branches hung confidently in the hollow space filled by the sound of water dropping in darkness, the only sound that marked the scene. A terror quickly gripped him as he sighted the stone lines that enclosed the monastery of Saint George, built on top of a way-station for the travellers who passed on this rugged, dangerous, ancient road five centuries before the life of the monk George Huseini. The monastery came into view, its dome suspended in the mountain like a strung orthodox icon.

Why might you stand here, listening to the call of minor miracles huddling in the strange powers of the wadi?—the angel Bashir Joachim wandering in the wilderness with Mary, giving the monastery its miraculous power to bestow blessings and the gift of pregnancy; Ilya’s flight from the oppression of King Ahab, the crows that brought him his bread and meat every morning; Christ drinking from the spring next to where the monastery was built, passing the wadi on his way to Jericho; the stories that turn all that exists here in this web of small miracles, each like a miniscule jinni set to the lure the passers-by.

The road where he stood was the ancient path between Jericho and Jerusalem. In the darkness of the rock formations and downslopes of hills, he could make out the voids of caves. These, he thought, were the same caves where monks had found refuge in the early years of Christianity’s persecution. He was enveloped now by the wadi, its caves and rock formations, its strange intractable places, sweet springs and the dark power that had protected the monks and isolated their worship. The low, slowed sound of falling water, the strange plants and birds, the fish flying over fault lines in the earth so close to the desert, it all seemed like a momentary, divine gift.

He shuddered to think that he walked now in the ‘valley of the shadow of death’. The fear that gripped him was undiminished by the miracles of the monastery, the wadi’s power to yield protection and isolation, and the herds of travellers that arrived in blue buses; by the children of the bedu who shouted cheerfully and climbed the stone walls by fixing ropes on the edges of the stones; and even by the two women travellers, most likely Germans, who stood now in front of the doorway snapping pictures of the bodies of the playing boys.

The story said that when the Persians despoiled the wadi on their way to Jerusalem, they slaughtered the ascetics in the caves, five thousand of them, including fourteen monks inside the halls, whose skulls were now kept in the monastery.

He tried to place it all in front of him now. An invading army that climbed the white hills and green fields into the mountains, following the course of the agitated water, pushing the birds and mountain foxes in front of them, soldiers panting and yelling at the openings of caves, and on the thresholds and steps of the monastery. Amid the exaggerations of this missionary narrative, there was still a silent element, the monks, to whom he could give no voice or cry to mark their fates.

This all came to completion as he arrived at the first steps rising to the monastery of Saint George.

More than thirty years ago, in Jabal al-Taj, the neighbourhood east of Amman, he had stopped in front of a poster on the door of a carpenter’s workshop, cheap and hastily printed in black and white. It showed the pictures of sixteen young men, the youngest, he thought, around fourteen years old. At the top of the poster, above the pictures, was a broad printed title, ‘Martyrs of the Battle of  Wadi al-Qalat’. In smaller print were details about the battle, a long-winded explanation lionizing the dead young men, removing none of obscurity of this battle.

Since then, Wadi Qelt had signified a dark passage through low thorn bushes and wounding stones, filled by a monotonous sound of water falling in darkness.

Since that morning, he had found himself running behind the wadi with no end to his questions. He asked his geography teacher, his older sister and his father if he returned home early in a good mood. He asked Ahmad, the boastful boy in his class whose father had emigrated from the camp to Germany, seeking work. He gathered pictures, maps and tourist prints left behind by pilgrims passing through the camp on their way to celebrate Epiphany at the Jordan River. All of this material he collected in a small tin sweets box, into which he also put the travellers’ descriptions that he found in the books of his often-absent father, along with newspaper clippings where the wadi was mentioned. It was in a story in one of the missionary books that he came across the massacre of the monks. The killing of the sixteen youths later melded into this. These stories overflowed in this place darkly, mixing into the narrative of the isolation and death of the monks.

The wadi was outside the box now, outside the scraps and pictures, fissuring open, breathing and panting in a painful, constant fall towards the lowland. It looked more impassable, cruel, anxious than anything he had imagined that morning in Amman, sweeping beyond what he had sketched from the piles in the box. None of the wadi’s impassibility was tempered by his passage to this point on foot. Its confusion and darkness remained, yielding only some confused glimmers of expectation between rock faces, hopes that some secrets might still come to light—some light on the dead youths, their lithe bodies and neutral black-and-white faces, or some light on the monks’ frocks that disappeared in the dark cavities of the watercourse.

The wadi started next to Jerusalem, in the village of Anata, which bore the name of the Canaanites’ Goddess Anatut, their goddess of war, love and the hunt. The narrative in the Torah gave a brief indication that King Solomon used to hunt and walk in these hills. But what did Solomon hunt in these hills, the king gifted to speak to the birds and animals?

In their time, the Byzantines had called it Anato. The Syriac-Arameans called it Anatiya.

He loved to trace the names of the villages and wadis, to revolve and etch their names through the ages that had passed over this land. It was a passion that started in his search for the name of their village. Zakariyya. It began up on the hill, four thousand years ago, when it was called Azkaah or Aziika, a name that came from the planting and tilling of the earth. It then moved, he thought, from the peak of the great hill bearing its name, down into the plain and the wadis around it, which were all named after trees. Wadi al-Sant, Wadi Butm where David took on Goliath, Dahr al-Kandul, and Wadi Bulis with its small shrine of the prophet who had that name. The wadis with their names and alterations were like living, speaking beings, he thought, as he continued to descend in Wadi Qelt down to its vanishing point in the plain of Jericho, where the ruins of Herod’s castle spread like wings on the wadi’s flanks, just south of the faded remnants of the royal garden.

Water cascaded from the stones to form a strange brook running into the Dead Sea, transforming, he thought, as if coloured by the cries of the Persian troops, inmixed with blood dripping from the sixteen boys more than thirty years ago.

As he continued the journey towards west of Jericho, he passed beyond the wadi and the monastery of Saint George, leaving the bodies of the young men stretching in the bends of the wadi. The massacre of the monks, the strange birds, wonders and plants of the afterlife, all continued their life behind him, as the air became heavy, pressing his chest, shoulders and eyes as he descended the river course below the sea level. He felt as if he joined some eternal waterfall, a companion that had waited for him for ever, encircling him now—armies, monks, raiders, plants, birds, water, scents, voices cherished like amulets, invocations, instincts; sixteen youths, women, horses, horses, foxes, hyenas, prophets holding miracles, miracles in search of prophets who had not yet found guidance; believers, the lost, the poets, philosophers, the sculptors and weavers, the mills and cane presses and fishermen; stags and tax collectors, priestesses, temples, a pale moon; the fences and prayers, betrayal and trumpets; and a lone adulteress left in the story like a puzzle.

This was his company as the water poured, vaunting its grandeur, constantly renewing itself, like some tremendous line of darkness and light, as he dropped below the sea level in his passage towards Jericho.

He felt something like the fulfilment of a promise deferred so long it was forgotten. His stubbornness and his submission drove him on. He knew he had to climb Mount Qarantal, whose southern face was marked by caves and caverns, as if the massacre itself had somehow slipped and fallen from the story and set out in pursuit of the mountain itself.

If he turned his eyes upward and blocked the glare of the sun, he could make out the monastery’s chambers suspended in the stone walls above him, just as they had been more than thirty years before, as if drawn on the mountain by a child’s hand.

He climbed, following the temple path, towards a narrow entrance that led onto a trodden dirt pass climbing the cliff-face towards the monastery near the summit. While the sun climbed in the east, another burning day rose to meet first the naked white hills and salt surface of the lake, then the knoll of palms and the banana fields at its base, the earthen houses and the trench stretching between the two mountain chains. Thick blue mist above obscured the distant scene of Jerusalem.

Jericho, like an explosion of sudden green, gathered in sight of the monastery. He thought of its ancient fears, this first city to fortify itself.

When he knocked on the monastery door, a small aperture opened. Behind it appeared the pale face of a nun, perhaps Greek, who spoke in starkly brief Arabic: ‘No visitors today.’

[. . .]

The lake on the plain, its dry banks and the flashing salt islets that pierced its heavy water, presented some absurd polar scene. To the east, a line of dark greenery obscured the glimmering river, whose sharp turns he could guess at only by following the line of dark green, behind which he imagined the worried course and turbid waters of the river. Behind him, the trench fanned out along the sides of the mountain. The scene appeared to him now like a lesson in history or geography that had leapt out of a book, and was breathing in front of him. Now he could rearrange the narrative. He could see the paths and movements of his heroes, on the shores of the lake, in the passes in the Balqa mountains, and in the wadis that shed their winter waters into the river. His eyes could trace the white hills that fall away in the ascent west of Jerusalem.

He stood in front of the closed aperture, alone in the burning heat of the noon sun, remembering the monk’s hand on his warm, bald head more than thirty years earlier. He had never told the monk his unslaked desire, to see the tomb of the monks. The desire remained with him today.

It is the first time he had returned to the monastery door, he thought, since he had come back here. Although the idea of climbing to the monastery had never left him, he had found excuses always, to put it off. He had overwhelmed by the idea of making all the arrangements required, to finally come back here. As he walked, his memories piled beside him, amassing as if threshed by some churning mower. The dead and the living all walked beside him, a caravan in which no one dies and no one arrives. The mower pushed it all into the pile beside him, all of them, places and fates, their dreams and mistakes. The lives they lost. It seemed that it could all be some enormous, meaningless exaggeration.

As he descended towards Jericho in Wadi Qelt, the ineluctable course of the river made sharp turns through water-carved stone. A feeling came back that had long disappeared. He felt again he was journeying in his own memories. He felt he had to return to these memories, to give them some arrangement. The beings the journey gave him, he could bring them back.

Intensely and slowly, he brought back his old, overlapping belongings, the things whose absence had discomposed his memory and pulled it apart like a straw mat.

It was after he came back here that he began to place his belongings, his memories, into a new box. He put them all in: the wadi and its dead, the monasteries and crows; Hind, with her stories and the laugh that he found obscene; the Israeli woman soldier, who seemed Russian, and all her silent gestures; the dialects, the roads and the Moroccan Jewish woman who owned the cafe—all the things that will be mentioned now. Here had grown heavy, necessary, strong. The place came to powers nourished in its shadows.

He had to begin at some event, some event that he might enter, to describe and change it, something he could tell as a story with an ending. They are not prophecies, but events, that seem to happen here, even as prophecies flood in from the mist in their complete forms, firm and eternal. He started with the fates of persons, and their intentions. He followed them as they laboured through the trivial facts of their lives. He prodded them into appearance on the roads and in the houses, or scattered through the humble fields.

He did not know where to start, or if the strands would yield to be woven together, but he knew, painfully, that here everything leads to everything. They all passed through the ‘valley of the shadow of death’ without protection.

This novel follows inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Zakariyya as they reckon with memory, displacement and decades of historical upheaval. Centered on a man returning to a monastery from his childhood, it weaves vivid personal stories with the collective experience of life under Occupation, creating a dreamlike reflection on loss and belonging.

GHASSAN ZAQTAN is a Palestinian poet, novelist, and editor. Born in Bethlehem, he has lived in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Tunisia.