A Street Divided by Dion Nissenbaum Page A

the Israeli families on the other side of the street as neighbors, even if they lived in different countries. Whenever one of the Israeli chickens wandered into No Man’s Land, Dawlat would shoo it back across the border.
    â€œThat would please our neighbors a lot, because it showed that we were honest,” she said one night, decades later, as her husband, kids and grandchildren squeezed together on their living room couches to hear old family stories. “Especially because people were afraid to talk to each other on both sides of the barbed wire.”
    In 1959, Zakaria married a young girl from the Old City, a 14-year-old named Nawal. She had a broad smile and dark, fiery eyes that let you know that she wasn’t one to be too deferential to her husband when she thought he was wrong. Nawal grew up in a home not far from al Aqsa. She spent her childhood learning the twists and turns of the Old City’s cobblestone alleys. She liked living off Chain Street, so close to al buraq —the wall where the Prophet Muhammad tied his buraq before riding the winged horse to Heaven. (It was the same 60-foot-tall wall that Jewish worshippers called the Wailing Wall.) And living so close to al Aqsa mosque was a blessing.
    Moving to No Man’s Land took time to get used to. The Bazlamit family was big. Her new mother-in-law was strong-willed. And Nawal had to come to terms with living between coils of barbed wire separating warring nations.
    The most dangerous part of any day was the trip out back to the neighborhood well, which rested up on a vulnerable part of the hill, close to the fence, well within rifle range of the Israeli guard posts obscured by the tree line above.
    The women would go to the well in the early morning or at dusk. Never when the sun was highest and tempers along the border seemed to be hottest. When they brought their buckets and pots for water, the women would catch glimpses of Israeli life on the other side of the barbed wire: children playing hide-and-seek in their gardens; women hanging laundry from clothes lines between the twisting tree branches outside their homes. It was a mirror image of life on their side of the border.
    One afternoon, while Nawal was at the well, she saw a lean Jewish man on the other side of the barbed wire trying to get her attention. She’d seen him before. He had big glasses and wore one of the little caps the Jewish men all seemed to wear. His shirt and jacket hung off his thin frame as he stood on the balcony of his home on the hillside above the well. He made a bulge over his belly and kept repeating a word in a language she didn’t understand. He kept putting his hand to his mouth.
    She didn’t know what to make of it all. Nawal didn’t know if this guy was crazy or hungry. He tried to reassure her and the other women at the well that he meant no harm.
    â€œGet some bread,” one of the women said to Nawal, who went back down to her house, wrapped up some freshly baked pita bread in a towel and brought it back up to the well. They unwrapped it and looked around to see if any soldiers might be watching. Nawal tossed it over the fence. The man rushed toward his side of the border, grabbed the bread with a wave of thanks and retreated to his stone home on the other side.
    Nawal laughed at her surreal life as she walked back down to her home with the other women.
    New Neighbors in No Man’s Land
    Zakaria, one of the shorter, rounder, quieter Bazlamit brothers, spent a little time in the Jordanian army before his mother convinced the military that her son had more important work at home. Zakaria trained soldiers and cooked for them in Abu Tor. He led neighborhood patrols and invited soldiers to dinner at his home in No Man’s Land—an action that could set off alarms for Israeli soldiers up the hill keeping watch on any suspicious military moves by the Jordanians.
    One of the Jordanian officers in charge of the area, a man they