This Place of Thorns

Marina Warner

 

An open thoroughfare once connected the cities of Syria to the countries that lay to the south; striking out across the desert from oasis to oasis, passing through Jericho and beyond. The road has seen the passage of many people and many goods, including precious myrrh, which Balthasar brought with him—he was the black king—as he followed the star. Myrrh, so rich, so fragrant, seeps from hard-bitten, barbed and scraggy thorn bushes, which need only stony barren soil; when you cut into the bark, it oozes a resin which is dull, sticky, and sickly yellow; but when sniffed, this flow is delicious and can be rubbed and warmed, suspended in oils or dried and burned to give out the sweetest scent, light and fresh as dew, gentle as a baby’s skin, pure as fresh water, a perfume of rejuvenation and beauty, promising conquest over the ravages of time and the body’s organic decay: a scent of paradise, myrrh! It’s a cruel plant, and yet it’s the true balm; its long, sharp needles repel all grazing animals with tender mouthparts, except for the very toughest billy goats. But its sap is a sweet remedy and solace; prepared as an unguent it can seal wounds and, inhaled in fumigations, it will clear sore lungs and heavy heads; it freshens stale linen and stuffy rooms; it transforms decaying flesh—ordinary mortal flesh; and it will preserve a mortal body for eternity.

It was the female Pharaoh Hatshepsut who, a millennium before the star drew the three kings down that westward desert road to search for the prophesied saviour, pioneered the idea of transplanting the myrrh-bearing trees from Gilead and Jericho, and set about shipping them westwards to Egypt. She foresaw the riches the sweet-smelling gluey stuff would reap for her treasury and so, in the equally parched soil on the outskirts of Heliopolis, she made “the garden where the true balsam grows”. You can see it marked on old maps of Cairo and is still there to this day, a little neglected but a sanctuary still: legend has it that Mariam—the Virgin Mary—her husband Joseph, and the baby stopped there on their flight from the massacre ordered by Herod.

 

 

It was a time of new massacres that brought Nour and her grandmother Zubayda to follow the same road that unfurls across the desert winding towards the Red Sea, where they were hoping to embark so they could sail north and make their way further… to another world and another time.

Nour was eleven years old, and her grandmother, Zubayda, was about fifty, but the long war had taken its toll on her; they were the only survivors they knew of from their large household and the whole apartment block in which they lived; the men were all long gone away to fight or disappeared into the torture basements of the regime—and they had endured together the long siege of their town and its systematic bombing and destruction. The latest onslaught of government forces swept them up along with a few straggling fugitives, old and very young only, and finally drove them out of their city. After many days’ march south—a drifting, erratic progress at night when they could escape the sun’s fist—they reached a meagre encampment. It had grown up against the double fence of high razor wire defending a border which had not been there before. Of necessity, they came to a halt and there they found others, who had reached it before them, called it the Place of Thorns, because thorns were the only thing that grew. The only other living things were lizards with frilled jowls like prehistoric dragons, some species of small, shiny metallic snakes, and precision-tooled birds of prey, which planed above on the look-out for the reptiles. There, Nour and Zubayda joined more women and children, living in shallow caves in the rocky sand, which they had tried to hollow more deeply using sticks of the thorn bushes. The new, heavily fortified border rose above them, glinting, spiked. Were it not so ferocious and menacing, it might have been tinsel, so gaily did its brand-new coils sparkle in the unremitting sunshine. This new border unspooled to the horizon on both sides, cutting a wide, empty swathe over the undulating, dry body of the desert, a scar twelve metres wide, running from the port in the north to the rose-red cliffs of sand in the high desert of Upper Egypt in the south. It prevented all access to the Gulf of Suez, and any attempt to cross.

They could not move on, nor could they retreat and turn north or south. They were checked to a standstill, like so many hundreds of others who had found themselves up against the new armoured border. It had carved out a place of no-one, a Terra Nullius which nobody could enter, or traverse, not unless they had serious matériel—hydraulic cutters, heavy caterpillar tanks, ironclad jeeps, bomber planes, or drones—to flatten it from the air.

The scar marked a place of unwelcome, where no man or woman or child lives or can claim ownership, a neutral place, unattributed, unmastered, an interzone between two armies facing each other, a cleft between. Untended, unattended, terrain vague, as the French call such wastelands. We see these spaces on the map, sometimes narrow, sometimes wider, a gap between two lines inscribed onto desert, meadow, mountains, streets, buildings: occasionally a gap that is not quite an alley has been left between two houses which have not been terraced but remain detached; this gap then acquires this dishevelled, orphan look. Sometimes such a border will slice right through the middle of a house or apartment block, bisecting it, as was threatened when the two mothers fought over a baby and asked Solomon to judge their claims. A place that was once a home can be left stranded on two sides of a border with a gap, a nothing, in-between. Passages and holes, leaving a tailor’s offcuts of territory, which, if you patched and pieced these plots one next to the other for a coat of many colours, would hang loose on a colossus, and provide enough land for a planetary moon where all those who have nowhere to stay and call their own could make a home. Or would that be an exile, to be in orbit elsewhere far from this world?

In the past, before Schengen, I remember how we used to walk through these nowheres; at Ventimiglia between France and Italy, for example, and it used to be a strange and exciting feeling, as one left one border post behind with its national guards and stepped into the perimeter that did not belong to anyone and met the different country’s policemen or soldiers and took stock of the way they handled themselves (did they twitch for their pistols, did they lounge about smoking? Why did they take so long to scrutinise the photo in one’s passport? Once I was with a friend who was ordered to shave off his beard to match his passport picture, but it was still touch and go). What about the cut of their uniforms (the bulk of their boots, the white of their spats, the swirl of their cock feathers)? And since those holiday times, we have seen so many undone by war and plague and famine, so many making their way across bridges, across frontiers, moving from one place where others belong, to another place where different others belong.

The unbelonging on the move in the spaces of nowhere.

 

 

Terra nullius—the land of nobody—began as a place to be shunned: the waste ground under the walls of a fortress, the fosse where the shameful dead lay exposed to carrion birds and animals (Antigone wanted to stop this happening to her brother Polynices). It was a place of execution, a killing field. It still is: the makeshift camp in the place of thorns where the fleeing huddled down into the sand to hide from aeroplanes flying low and drones hovering over the strip watching for attempts to cross it; they were hiding in the earth like animals, shrinking from rumours of armies on the move using the territory between the fences as a fast patrol road.

There was a time when it could seem amusing that antiquarian collectors in the United States paid good money for varieties of historic barbed wire, used in the staking out of property in the West, parcelling out the prairies to the new landowners, each one identifiable from his design of barb and hook, just as his herds were known to belong to him from the brand burned into their hide. But these curiosities of a particular connoisseurship now feel ominous when bales of silver razor wire unfurl for miles and miles to demarcate frontiers of the rich world, keeping out the poor, leaving between the high, thorny fences a wild forbidden territory. In no man’s land you mustn’t be seen or the official armies of one side or the other, or random snipers working for traffickers, or vigilantes working for their own purposes, will pick you off. You can tunnel your way through. Burrows are one place where you might survive. On the surface concealment is necessary.

Nour and Zubayda were given space in the scooped hollows in the sand which other arrivals had made for shelter. Young, anxious volunteers with NGOs and two officials from UNHCR roamed the settlement and promised the fugitives they would be moved somewhere with better facilities. But Zubayda told Alison Turner, one of the UNHCR representatives, that she, Zubayda Umm Tamim, Jaddati to Nour, her granddaughter, would never be moved. She would stay in the place of thorns, she declared, in this ragged shanty village which had grown up against the high, shining bales of barbed wire on the new border, because her son Tamim would be coming to fetch them both, herself and the little girl. He had promised to as soon as the fence came down.

She had an appointment with him and she was not going to risk missing it.

“But that is impossible,” said Alison, the UN official, who wanted to be kind and understanding. “The camp here is in an extremely dangerous zone: there are snipers on the other side overlooking it. It has grown up without planning. There is no shelter. You are living like animals in the ground. It is insanitary. We are evacuating you all. As soon as we can provide proper facilities. We must for your own good.”

She did not add that there was nobody left in the town they had left; that it was a heap of twisted iron and concrete rubble; that all who had survived the siege and the bombing and the carnage that ensued in the mopping-up operation when the attackers went in to take control of the ruins, all of those few survivors were scattered, some of them here, in this makeshift camp, where they had washed up against the high coils of wire of the new border fence. That if Zubayda’s son Tamim were in combat—it was likely, given the allegiance of their town, that he was with the rebel forces—that his chances were… well, Alison Turner did not want to linger on the thought.

She remembered then that she had been walking by the sea one New Year’s Day and found a solitary worker on the beach gathering the débris that winter storms had driven inland: a great shelf of kelp and dulse, pebbles and shells had been swept onto the once creamy sand, and in it, all higgledy-piggledy, was strewn the flotsam of summer holiday-makers and cruise-tourists—sun tan lotion, flip flop sandals, scores of plastic bottles and jerry cans and containers of every kind, the ruins of dinghies and outboard motors, torn scraps of anoraks, tarpaulins, sails, and carrier bags, bin liners, nappies, condoms, and other things more unmentionable; she recalled the resignation and despair in the workman’s face as he trudged up and down the beach, trying to bring order. But a local council worker, however weary, wielding a pick and a broom and a rubbish cart could still comb the beaches and collect together all the stuff that the sea had brought; whereas, here in this place of thorns, the storm had driven real, living people, old women and children, whom the latest battles had swept up and stranded on the edge of the new, impassable no man’s land. She, Alison, with her little bit of spoken Arabic, was trying to gather them together and take them somewhere else… dump them somewhere else—the thought barely surfaced, but she felt it prick her, like a spur on the cursed bushes you had to skirt so carefully or else get savaged.

When the refugees were so obdurate, like that Zubayda—she was about to think to herself, that old woman, but she probably wasn’t much older than Alison herself—who, with her small granddaughter, refused to be moved, her well-meant work became so difficult. Force was the last thing she or her colleagues wanted to use, but in some cases, it became necessary—inevitable. The place of thorns was exposed in more ways than one, it was marooned, and it could not sustain life, nothing besides those sticky, smelly bushes that clung on, even taking root in the barren scar tissue where the tanks had flattened and fenced in no man’s land.

 

 

The first day after what was to be the final, conclusive raid and the end of their town, before they were gathered up with the others and swept for days onwards, trudging by night towards the border, Zubayda was holding Nour in the crook of her body, as they lay deep in a ditch by the road, hiding from the drones as best they could, and she saw a man stepping through the stony field as if it were a summer meadow; there was green light haloing his strong, lean body and playing around his bare head; his soft curls, falling to his shoulders, seemed fronds rather than hair.

When he touched Zubayda on the arm, she felt a bolt of light come off him, live and quick and fresh, as if she were a fruit and he had plucked her at the perfect moment of ripeness. He smiled, while at the same time putting a finger to his lips to indicate that Zubayda should not stir or speak and wake the little girl, and then he leant in close to Zubayda’s ear and said, his words passing through her as if he had struck a clear bell:

“When the fence falls, and as it shall, you’ll see your son Tamim again. Don’t forget. When the fence falls in the place of thorns.”

Zubayda did not experience this apparition as an apparition, if an apparition is a delusion or a fantasy. The angel was a messenger from the future, and his springtime words brought her tenacious conviction and a luminous calm, such as turns the sea to pearly silk and sweet milky warmth after a cruel storm has torn it to pieces. She held the promise tightly in her heart, that Nour would find her father in the place of thorns and then, it would follow that they would together find her mother Amina again, and she would find her son again, when the fence came down. She did not know what the messenger meant by the fence or the place of thorns, but she remembered.

In the provisional underground shelter that was the camp, Nour would queue to fetch their quota of rice and container of water every day from the UNHCR delivery, and bring them to Zubayda, who joined the group around a fire made from the thorn bushes, which spat heady scented resin as it burned, to cook their rations.

Nour took note and began collecting the nubs of gum from the twigs and keeping them. At home, they had always burned incense, and she knew the resin could be tapped and crystallised, and that when it smouldered it spread potently, an indoor perfume, clean and fresh and lively as sweet water itself. Lacking a sharp knife to score the bark, Nour would bend the branches till they cracked open and released myrrh, drops of gum bubbling from the lesion in beads that gleamed, like crystals of unrefined sugar. The thorns are brutal to the hands of a child, even through the cloths Nour bound around them, and can inflict deep gashes. Still, she persevered.

Nour was only a child, eleven years old, but she had learned to forage through the two-year-long siege of her home city; she would spot seedlings invisible to others, and she soon began identifying which grasses and flowers growing in the cracks of the bombed buildings were edible; she would shield them from further damage by providing shade or surrounding them as far as she could with sharp stones to discourage some scavengers, and she would water them.

Ever since she was six years old, Nour’s fingers and toes tingled at the proximity of water, and her nostrils quivered, and her eyes prickled when she was near the precious element, however deeply buried. In the place of thorns, her hands wound in her clothes, she would break off twigs of the thorn bushes to begin her search for underground water, and when she hit upon a damp area of sand in the back of one of the caves, she began scrabbling in the earth with the broken end of the twig. Moisture began welling up like a frog belching in little purling, winking chatter. When she called over some of the other children, Alison followed, curious. She marvelled, she had never seen anything like it. When Nour asked for help to capture the flow, and began to level a patch of ground in the shade of a rock and seed it with the tiniest particles, brought on the wind, the official did what she could to provide cans and pipes and even a spigot; the little girl brought in some of the women to nurse the puny shoots as they struggled in the shade near the aquifer she had found.

 

 

The promised evacuation plans of the community were taking a long time to materialise, and the days waiting in the warren of shelters under the sand were weary. Besides, the NGO workers were afraid, and becoming restless. Would the UN supplies continue to arrive? Or would they have to abandon the camp altogether?

Her Jaddati, her granny Zubayda was not well, however; the darkness in the underground shelter and the blaze outside in the dryness of the desert, where the breeze carried sand into every nook and cranny of her sore body, even if she kept herself wrapped against it, was scouring her eyes. She was crying a lot, too, wearing herself out, and sleeping badly. Nour did what she could—she bathed her granny’s eyes in the new-found water and tried to swab her ears inside and out and soothe the creases between her limbs, sluicing off the irritant accumulations of sand. But day by day, Zubayda was growing weaker. She sat in the dark in the hollow in the sand, mute and unresponsive, even to Nour’s offerings.

No news came of any change in the conflict, and the scar of No Man’s Land remained impregnable and the old woman was wasting away, while the little girl was still busying about, almost happy with her patch of seedlings.

News of the aquifer, and of the nascent patch of new growth reached others who had been caught up in the turmoil and harried here and there in the desert; the place of thorns began to attract more and more people to the camp, which, as a result, and to the growing anxiety of the few remaining NGO personnel attempting to keep order, started developing features of a more permanent settlement—men started arriving, men without identifying badges or uniforms. But they brought with them bags of seed and took away Nour’s small harvest of myrrh in exchange. A few of the women helped her clear more land and level and plant it in the area moistened by the underground spring which her dowsing had uncovered.

 

 

Then the men coming through bringing supplies warned of an imminent conflagration. A battle front was opening up along the new border. The night after they left, the few NGOS remaining came running: the time for evacuation had come. The camp was now in the heart of the conflict zone.

“Grab what you can nearest to you and come, now, hurry!” Newly arrived officials in white boiler suits began herding them into the lorries until each lorry was bursting: in the hubbub, the refugees did not cry out or shout, but boarded silently, the women holding on tight to the children they were looking after—their grandchildren or a neighbour’s orphan. Nour was picked up by Alison and swept up into the sputtering vehicle. She called out, “But Jadatti! Zubayda!”

Zubayda was obdurate. She would not be leaving.

“I was told,” she said. “When the fence falls, and as it shall, you’ll see your son Tamim again. Don’t forget. When the fence falls in the place of thorns.”

At the last moment, as the lorry was grinding into motion, Nour hurled herself out of the vehicle on to the sand.

“Go, go! Now,” Alison ordered the driver, her jaw set, her eyes burning.

 

 

Zubayda took Nour into her lap and she curled there; they drew back to the depths of the hollow in the rocks. The half-blind, withered grandmother stroked the child’s hair and crooned to her. They began waiting; the sounds of the battle roared around them in flaming shafts of orange and gold and scarlet; the earth shook and heaved as the world exploded; flashes streaked across the night sky and lit up silver-white the rocks and the dunes as if the moon was bursting over and over again.

When the tumult subsided, Nour crept out of the burrow and looked around her: tinselly bales of barbed wire lay this way and that on the desert floor and she could see, where the high fences stretched on either side, they were buckled and hanging loose, swaying; craters yawned around their foundations. The long wide scar between them was scattered with debris—with indecipherable wreckage, pieces of uniform, maybe bodies, muddled up with jagged splinters of armour. It was quiet, the air sulphurous and hot. She went to fetch water, soaking her scarf in the puddle by the makeshift pipe and brought it to Zubayda to moisten her lips and wipe her face.

They heard the rumble of vehicles approaching and drew back into the darkness of the back of the shelter. More than one, many it sounded like. No other noises now; no gunfire, no explosions.

Nour slithered on her stomach to the mouth of their shelter and raised her head as far as she could.

“Jadatti, they are waving white flags…”

Then, as the jeeps came abreast of the camp, and the soldiers riding in them could see the remains of habitation, a cry rang out through a loud hailer:

“You have nothing to fear! Come out! We bring peace!”

Nour scrambled to her feet and waved her scarf.

One of the jeeps stopped, turned and drove through the broken bundles of barbed wire and into the fence, which fell at its approach like so much matchwood.

The driver drove up to Nour, his companion in the seat beside him still waving the white flag.

“Who else is here?” he asked. “Are you alone?”

“The others left, but Jaddati is here. Jaddati, come, they are not angry, they are not attacking us. They’re smiling. Look!”

She pulled at Zubayda to come out into the light, and the old woman shielded her dimmed eyes as she sought the soldier’s face.

“The fence is down, Jaddati! Look, the fence has fallen down!”

“Yes,” said the soldier, pulling out some oranges from a bag his companion in arms held out to him. “Here… I expect you haven’t seen one of these for a while! From Jericho.”

“You are a liar,” said Zubayda in cold fury.

“Who are you calling a liar?” said the soldier.

“No, Jadatti, he is telling the truth. I can see, the fence has fallen down!”

“It cannot be,” Zubayda answered, searching out the little girl’s face with her milky, lunar half-seeing eyes.

“But it is so!”

“It cannot be. I am Zubayda Umm Tamim, and I was shown in a dream—no, it was revealed to me by a visitation, a visitation from an angel of the spring clothed in a halo of green light, that when the fence came down in the Place of Thorns I would see my son Tamim again.”

The soldier dropped to one knee and looked earnestly into the face of the little girl.

“And what are you called, my child?”

“Nour,” she answered. “And my mother was Amina and my father Tamim, and this is my grandmother, Jaddati, Tamim’s mother, Zubayda Umm Tamim.”

Tamim whirled and caught up the child in his arms and then drew the old woman to her feet to hold her close so the three of them were one.

“Umm Zubayda, my name is Tamim, and you are as my mother would be, were she still living.”

“But I am living.” Zubayda’s eyes moistened and the scouring of the sand softened and healed, and she was able to see that the fence had indeed fallen in the Place of Thorns.

 

 

Not long after, as Zubayda was being transported by military ambulance to the war-torn hospital in the nearest still functioning city, along with other survivors whom the victorious squadron had found straggling, battered and starving along the now mangled border, the emerald angel came once again in a glow of spring, and touched the dying woman with his fiery hand and called her to cross with him into his other world.

The soldier called Tamim looked after Nour as if she were his own; she grew up to become a perfumier in Cairo, and now works in a pharmacy; she lives in Matarieh, that part of the city near the ancient Garden of the True Balm and is hoping to be able to join with others to revive its verdure one day and restore its popularity with pilgrims and visitors. Like many others of her generation, she knows that her mother was lost in the final destruction of her family’s home town. Tamim is still hard at work trying to consolidate the fragile peace that followed the battle in which his side came to be the victors, a battle which for a time opened the borders once again between peoples who in times past had been friends, and raised the hope of all that means in terms of exchanges of love, conversation, thought and produce, along the ancient roads of gold, frankincense and myrrh.