This piece originally appeared in Sendero vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 2002.

Borders

My lover and I are walking across the border into Jordan, and the sun is so hot it’s eroded a pool in the top of my head and filled it with fire. If I move too fast, it will spill out and burn my ears. My lover doesn’t trust the border guards: he’s Israeli. He hovers protectively while they interrogate us. They make him fill out forms while they examine my passport. "Monica? Monica?" they laugh, pronouncing my name wrong. Long "O," long "E," short "A." Really, it’s short "O," schwa, schwa. But they don’t care about that. "Monica Lewinsky? Bill Clinton?" Beel Cleentone, they say. They stand between my lover and me, so he can’t see them admire my tattoo, poke my breast through my tank top. Laugh.

We want to go to Petra, where they filmed the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but we won’t take the bus, sit among the women in their headscarves and the men with their mustaches. Maybe the other passengers would include chickens or goats, but I’ll never know. A cab is waiting at the border; the driver will take us to Petra for thirty dinars, and his brother will come and bring us home for twenty-five.

First the cab must go to a garage in Aqaba. I’ve seen Aqaba a hundred times, from the other side of the Red Sea. From Eilat, Aqaba looks pristine and magical, like each white box is a pawnshop filled with djinn lamps and storytellers. From Aqaba, Aqaba is ugly: squat gray rectangles, hung with signs for Kodak film and Amstel beer. Written Arabic is scribble-scrabble to me, like a doctor’s handwriting.

I didn’t know my lover spoke Arabic, but he does. He talks to the driver the whole way to Petra, and translates: The driver’s wife is barren. He will take her to Syria to see a specialist.

They make it easy for cruise ship passengers in Jamaica. They like your dollars; they don’t care what you bring into the country, or what you take out of it. A tall Jamaican soldier in a red beret and mirrored sunglasses hangs on the gate, making sure only Americans come through. He has an AK-47 to keep his countrymen out. He doesn’t smile when I take his picture, only looks surprised.

The women all want dollars to braid my hair, but I don’t want my hair braided. I have friends in the States who braid my hair for free. I don’t like the way it looks; I don’t like the way it feels. I can’t explain this. They clench their teeth, angry. Offended. It’s not because I’m proud, but they don’t understand. Long-haired American women in Ocho Rios should pay them to make braids, they feel.

The men all want to sell me marijuana. I don’t mind some marijuana, but I don’t want my parents to see. And I only need to buy it once. A man in a crafts booth shows me how much he has; it looks like a quarter ounce. "Fifteen dollars," he says. Cheaper than I ever heard of, but I talk him down to eleven anyway. Everyone likes to dicker. But I only need to buy it once, and when they try to sell me marijuana again and again, I shake my head.

I hold up my camera when a truck drives past, its bed crammed with passengers dressed in pink and green and yellow. The men and women wave, and when I snap the picture they cheer. The photograph will be a blur of colors.

In Spain, we are given this warning: "There are many Gypsies in Avila. Some of them sell tablecloths. Some of them are pickpockets." We only meet the first kind: raisin-skinned women, with plum-shaped bodies, draped in armfuls of white lace. Should we buy a tablecloth? No. Why spend hundreds of dollars when someone will just upend their wineglass over it? This is not the first time we’ve had this conversation in Spain, about expensive tablecloths.

Avila has everything a medieval city needs: a wall, first of all, with stones and towers and battlements. Also, a well-kept, double-tiered Roman aqueduct, towering over the center of town. Cathedrals. Lots of cathedrals, all dedicated to Saint Theresa.

She was born a Jew, we learn, which we understand to mean she was forcibly converted. We don’t like this story, but we’ve heard it all over the country. We didn’t need any warnings. Saint Theresa’s biggest cathedral is topped by spiky turrets: something dangerous. Inside, there is a glass case full of relics, her actual belongings: a crumbling prayer book, a tiny slipper, a leathery finger. They took her culture when she was a child, and her finger when she died. But it’s probably not her finger at all.

Even though I’ve been told a hundred times, and even read all about it in the Lonely Planet book, I still can’t believe it. I’ve been walking around De Pijp for an hour, seeing the symbol in the window, but still fearful. Lots of signs are in English, but I can make out a great deal of Dutch. For years, I’ve been trying to get to Amsterdam, and I’ve been here all day, and I’m sober.

I must seem foolish to the man who comes out of the coffee shop and sees me examining the green and white sticker on the door. "Are you going in?" he asks in English. Everyone speaks English.

"Is it good?"

"Sure."

So I go in, and a pretty white girl with frizzy brown hair is standing behind the bar, wanting to help me. And I’m paranoid. "Do you have something nice to smoke?" I am discreet, by habit.

In the back, she has Tupperware canisters of kind bud, dozens of them. She is so cheerful, and brings me exotic teas from a tea chest that’s as long as the bar, as tall as she is. There’s no alcohol in this bar, only kind bud and herbal tea. A beautiful black man with dreadlocks past his shoulders gives me a bowl of nuts and raisins. He wants to make friends with me, but I’m too angry with an Australian man I came to Holland with, too high to explain. I can’t make small talk. It’s been a long time since I was stoned.

When I get up to leave, the girl and the man ask me to stay. I think that I’ll come back here again and again. This is my favorite bar in the whole world. But when I try to find it, I can’t. I look all week long, but I never get back to that bar.

"We call this the pregnant border." The tour guide explains why, but it’s evident: the fertile crescent billowing around the UN encampment has the silhouette of a gravid woman. An old tank rusts softly to itself on this promontory. All the boys and most of the men want to have their picture taken in front of it.

The UN encampment is far away, to the right, and to the left, the guide points out a city. "A ghost town," she explains. "The UN agreement in 1967 allowed the Syrians to keep this city, but only if no one may carry a gun. No one, not even a police. You see, even they cannot control their own citizens without guns, so they give up the city. It’s empty. And in the space between, you see their army."

We nod behind our cameras. I take a panoramic view: click, click, click. Later, I’ll put them all together. Feet crunch in the gravel behind us, near the bus: two soldiers jogging leisurely. It’s only ninety-five degrees here, much cooler than in the south, in the desert. I can feel the difference, but the other tourists perspire just watching exercise.

"These are U.N. soldiers. They can run on this side. They cannot run on the other side. Ten years ago, two soldiers, two young men, went to run and the Syrians killed them. They would not return the bodies."

Before lunch, an Israeli woman tells about sleeping in a bomb shelter for three years of her childhood. "It became too difficult for our parents to carry us down every night; so we went to bed there." She says they waited until the kindergartners came out to play before throwing shells and mortars down from the heights.

The view seems very bleak, from this side. I’ll never know how it looks from the other side. I can never go to Syria. There are too many Israeli stamps in my passport. One is too many. They won’t let me in the country.