Arabic for Beginners

by Ariela Freedman

  “Don’t you want a picture of yourself in the olive grove, before things start going crazy?” Elah asked. “This peaceful, pastoral landscape?” She waved her hand. Instead I took a picture of her smoking. We passed the Germans. They were part of a church group, and were actually wearing lederhosen. They stayed on the top of the hill, so that they wouldn’t get too caught up in any fallout from the protest. The average age in the group looked to be about seventy—they were elderly activists with bad teeth and sunburns and cardboard signs—and even though it probably wasn’t fair I didn’t trust their motives at all. If you were German, and you lived through that war, then you didn’t get to say anything about a Jewish state.

  Beside me was a man from Boston. His name was Jeffrey and he looked like he was in his mid-thirties. He said that he was in Israel to write a book about the conflict. I asked him how long he’d been in Israel. “Three weeks,” he said. I asked him if he knew Hebrew. “A little,” he said. “Arabic?” “No.” “And how much longer will you stay?” He scowled at me, sensing that my questions were no longer just polite. “I’m halfway through my trip,” he said. “What qualifies you to write about the conflict?” I said. He looked at me angrily and trudged ahead. He had an odd, rolling walk and was sweating profusely. A young Palestinian man hovered at his elbow.

  The path rose up a hill, and once we were past the crest we could see the grey stretch of security wall. It was just a dull ribbon on the landscape. Then we heard a popping sound, like fireworks. People were running before I realized what was happening. Against the clear blue sky the rockets rose like an air show before the grey-blue plumes drifted into the crowd.

  A boy running past me was wearing a gas mask, people were coughing and running, and then I couldn’t see anymore. The taste was acrid in my throat, like something I’d vomited out, and the gas burned my skin and especially my eyes. I ran slowly. “Internationals,” I heard a voice behind me calling, “Internationals ...come help! Come help us! They are arresting people.”

  I did not come back. I kept running, faster now, in the other direction. The German tourists had stayed at the top of the hill, banners unfurled; they looked alarmed as we ran past them, eyes streaming. I had lost track of Elah and tried to look for her as I ran.

  At the village, I sat on a low wall in the shade. In the distance I could still hear the faint popping sounds, and see the mist of smoke. Elah finally appeared over the top of the hill, her eyes red.

  “Good,” she said when she saw me. “Now let’s find Shira.”

  Her cellphone rang and she listened, eyes wide. “It’s Shira. She says Micah’s been arrested. Wait, I can’t hear her.” She plugged her other ear with a finger. “She’s still down there, in front.”

  Small knots of people had started to gather around us, looking for ways home. I wondered how anyone had ever protested before cellphones. The protestors now had a Facebook page; they tweeted updates and warnings; they found each other by texting.

  Elah’s phone rang and she said, “It’s Micah.” She spoke to him for a minute, and then put the phone down. “He’s in the police van. They let him call. He sounded mildly amused, to tell you the truth. He wants someone to pick up the car. My fleece!”

  “What?”

  “My fleece is in that car! I really like that sweatshirt. I hope nothing happens to it.”

  The phone rang again. “We’re getting a lift. With Ori.”

  Ori was a man in his eighties, in ill-fitting pink pants, big sunglasses, and a large, floppy red cap. He was a member of Anarchists Against the Wall; he had been an activist, he said, since he was 14, before the establishment of the state. There were two other activists in the car, both women, one young, one old. The younger one had purple hair, a stretched-out black tank top, camouflage pants; the older one had whiskers on her chin and cheeks, and was small and a little hunched. We kept pulling over as Ori made phone calls, trying to figure out who’d been detained, arranging the logistics of stranded cars and passengers.

  “I am too old to drive and talk,” he announced, pulling over for the fifth time.

  “Is he the leader of the group?” I asked the woman sitting beside me, gesturing towards the driver’s seat. She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Well, we’re anarchists.”

  Ori pulled over before the checkpoint—the soldiers knew him and were more likely to stop the car if he was driving. He pulled his absurd hat over his head as if it made him less conspicuous and the woman in front drove, pulling her T-shirt inside out so it hid the anarchist slogan. After the checkpoint he drove us the rest of the way into the city, explaining the system of psychotherapy he’d helped pioneer, which involved, as far as I could understand,

  giving full expression to your emotions as they emerged so that they weren’t suppressed into symptoms.

  “If you want to cry,” he said, “you just cry. If you want to weep, you weep. You feel what you feel. I teach people to do that.”

  The smell of the gas was stuck in my nose, and in the back of my throat like a dead thing. Still, I was free.

  It was strange to drive over the hill and be back in Jerusalem in time to pick Sam up from school, to meet the other mothers outside the daycare. Which was the real Israel? The protesters running from a cloud of tear gas with the sounds of shooting in the background, or these women smoking cigarettes where their children could not see them and waiting for the school day to end?

  I mentioned Bi’ilin to Jenna and she said, “God, I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  Jenna said, “Well, you’re a mother. You have responsibilities. Anyway, those people just do it because it makes them feel special—they’re not accomplishing anything.” She looked at the camera hanging from my shoulder and said, “Did you get some good pictures?”

  That night as I lay in bed next to Simon, who was not asleep, I could not forget that when I heard the people down the hill calling in English for help, I had run faster than I knew I could run, straight in the other direction, away from the voices that were calling for me.

  PART 2

  11.

  Bi’ilin had left a strange taste in my mouth. Not just the gas, but the whole scene—the surface drama and the indelible sadness underneath. I kept thinking of what Jenna had said about my responsibilities, only I wasn’t sure where my responsibilities lay. The more time I spent in the country, the more confused I felt. Everything disoriented me. Different trees, different flowers, different smells in the air, the opalescent glimmer of Jerusalem stone on all of the buildings. I was unused to the stark beauty of the city, with its white houses and a sky too bright to look at directly. One morning the khamsin blew in from the desert and covered the city in a yellow fog, so that the hills vanished in the thick mist. Drifts of sand built up on the windshields of cars, and I reached over and rubbed the grains between my fingers, thinking of the snow I had left behind.

  We still did touristy things, like taking the boys to the market on a Friday afternoon. The last time I was in Israel, they had not yet built the promenade into the Old City, lined with fancy cafes, upscale shops, and American and European chain stores. Even now, some of the buildings were still being renovated and the stones were numbered in red so that they could be repaired and then put back into place. The arcade was a brand new temple where you could worship the gods of Louis Vuitton and American Apparel. But ever had it been thus; when Christ overturned the tables of the moneylenders, that must have been right where they sat.

  Even in this shiny and neutral space there was an edge of hostility. As we were walking through Mamilla to Jaffa Gate a man came up to me. He was tubby and sweaty, unshaven and insistent, slogans shouting loudly on his ill-fitting T-shirt and his hat. He wore a fanny pack around his hips, under the sloppy swag of his belly, and he held a roll of stickers in his hand.

  “Here!” he said in a tone of false jollity. “Have a sticker! I’ll put i
t on your hats!”

  “No thank you,” I said, walking faster, but he followed us.

  “I’ll put it on your children’s hats!” he said. “It’s just a sticker. It’s free! What’s the matter? What’s your problem? You don’t want it even though it’s free!” His voice squeaked, as if he’d never heard something so absurd. “Take it. Just take it!”

  I was pulling the children now, looking straight ahead. A few people looked at us but nobody stopped. The man lumbered after us like a tank, his face red and his breathing heavy. “What’s wrong with that man?” Gabriel said, and I said, “He’s crazy. Don’t pay any attention to him.” I said it loudly, so that the man would hear me.

  Simon had gone ahead to buy some juice; I hoped he would be back quickly. I didn’t feel exactly unsafe, just harassed and uncertain.

  As we reached the steps to the Old City, the man stopped. “Let me ask you a question. Just one question. Can I ask you a question? Do you or do you not believe that Jerusalem should stay forever the undivided capital of the Jewish people?”

  I should have been silent, but some devil possessed me. I looked back over my shoulder. His face changed, and the false smile disappeared. He looked more than angry—he looked enraged.

  “No,” I said.

  He flared right up. “You’re one of those, aren’t you? One of those anti-Semitic Jewish parasites! That’s what you are. Scumbags. People like you are the very worst: self-haters, racist, anti-Semitic Jews, the lowest of the low,” he yelled at us from the bottom of the steps. “You should kill yourselves and the world would be better off!”

  I could still hear him as we walked away. My heart was racing, as though we had been in danger. Simon was walking towards us, balancing four flimsy paper cups of fresh juice. He had heard only the end of the diatribe.

  “What happened?” he said, and I said, “Nothing. A crazy person, that’s all.” My hands were sweaty, and I’d been holding the boys too tightly; I loosened my grip and Gabriel released his hand and said, “Ow. Why are we walking so fast?” But he wasn’t really interested.

  “Do you want to go home?” Simon said, but I shook my head. “He should be arrested,” I said, and my voice sounded tinny and mean. “They wouldn’t let him stand there and do that if he was a Muslim. He’d be in jail in a minute. Only Jews are allowed to be that obnoxious here.”

  Past Jaffa Gate, low stone steps led into a warren of stalls, canopied with blue shade that was a relief after the white heat of the new city. And after the sterile promenade, the gaud and glitter of the market was also a solace. Beaded blouses and tapestries hung from the stalls; below them were velvet boards laden with necklaces, silver bowls of turquoise and jasper, baskets of miniature stuffed camels.

  In the nineties, the Arab market was mostly off limits, under curfew and heavily policed. There were still men in navy girded with handguns, watchful behind their dark glasses, positioned on either side of the entrance like caryatids. But now the market was much more crowded—boys in black hats and peyos shortcutting their way back from the Western Wall, buses full of African tourists schlepping suitcases full of merchandise. The most dedicated shoppers and the most adept bargainers were these Africans on pilgrimage; they came by the busload, carrying large wheeled suitcases, and they bought blankets and toaster ovens, not the T-shirts and carved chess sets and belly dancing costumes that were for more dilettantish shoppers. They wore faded button-down shirts and slacks, rubber flip-flops, colourful kente cloth. I saw a woman standing impatiently outside a stall waiting for her husband to finish negotiating, her purchases perfectly balanced in a duffle bag on her head, her lips pressed together

  and her hands on her broad hips. They were the very best at bargaining, my friends at the market said. Better than Arabs, even. The sellers were too busy to notice us, and the boys too dazzled to stop, with their fingers crushed against our own. T-shirt stands sold Israeli Defence Forces camouflage next to images of Arafat and Obama in keffiyehs, endless variations of “I got stoned in Bethlehem,” Coca-Cola slogans in Hebrew.

  “The beauty never stops here, does it,” Gabe said, impressed by the magpie’s nest of heaped metals and glass beads. He was six years old and easily dazzled by everything shiny and small. He and his brother both bought plush camels with ornate beaded saddles, since Sam always needed what Gabe had. It would take years for them to realize that fairness did not mean having exactly the same thing.

  “There’s no lack of camels,” Gabe said as he picked his out of a basket of identical, long-necked plush creatures. He had the inappropriate vocabulary of a child who was read to at length every night. He already delighted in indirect phrasing and unusual words, and in his slightly off-key, six-year-old understanding of understatement and irony.

  The camels had luxurious eyelashes and human smiles. They were made in China, and when you pressed their stomachs they said “I love you” in English. Later, at home, the boys amused each other by throwing the camels at the floor and listening to them caterwaul like battered spouses until we said that the game was illegal. We were fond of laws in our house, though we tended to change them every morning. It was so much easier to have a rule than to make a request; you didn’t have to explain the law. The boys were young enough that they took every rule for granted.

  After the market, we went to the Tower of David. The museum on the grounds was shiny and expensive. We climbed the stairs up the tower and walked along the ramparts, and Sam tried to squeeze himself through the narrow slits in the wall. At the parapet, tourists jostled for the view. A woman in a long jean skirt, her hair entirely covered by a baseball cap, led a tour group of teenage girls who were occupied with their cellphones, heads leaning together over the tiny screens. It was a kind of atrocity tour; I listened, fascinated and horrified.

  “Here,” she said in a bored voice, pointing towards the cemetery, “is the place where the Jordanians desecrated Jewish graves, piling up tombstones to use as latrines. And there,” her arm swung north, “in 1948, they murdered a convoy of doctors and nurses headed towards the Hadassah medical hospital.”

  The girls giggled and whispered, smelled like bubblegum and shampoo. They weren’t really listening, but there was this dark worm twisting into their consciousnesses that would grow on fear and distrust and gradually colour everything they assumed about this place. They would come to believe that they were surrounded by enemies.

  Sam tried to scrabble up the parapet wall, and I pulled him back. “I can’t see,” he complained, and I lifted him to my hip while we looked over the old and new cities. There was a sheer drop down to the stones of the street. He pointed to the gold in the distance and said, “That’s the holy temple.”

  “That’s the Dome of the Rock,” I said.

  His hand found the pewter dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. “And there, that’s the other holy temple!”

  Two men hung back, talking to each other in low tones. The younger man wore a white shirt with pressed khakis; they both wore flip-flops on their feet. They followed us into the building. There wasn’t much information in the exhibit, but there was a film, so we ducked into the dark, cool theatre and watched an animated short about Jerusalem that somehow managed to skip two thousand years of history, from the destruction of the Second Temple to the establishment of the state. I translated the Hebrew to Sam, whispering to him along with the narration. The men I had noticed sat behind us, and I could feel the heaviness of their disapproval.

  The younger one leaned forward and said to me, “It wasn’t really like that.”

  “I know,” I whispered back, but it was too much for me to translate and critique at the same time.

  The film concluded with a victory montage, swelling music, sunrise, a people finally in their homeland. The men left before the credits ran, and we headed down to the courtyard for ice cream. I thought of Jenna: would she have taken offence at the film, would she have been like the
men sitting behind me, frustrated and mournful? But I knew the answer already. She would have assumed that the film was all lies, since that was her assumption about most of the world. She would have liked the tower, but would have complained about the stairs. She would have felt cheated at the lack of a gift shop.

  We ended the day at the Western Wall. When you have always worshipped in the dark and cluttered interiors of synagogues it is strange to transition to a marble platform, an austere space exposed under the midday sun. There is a popular Israeli song about the Wall. The words are, “There are people with hearts of stone / and there are stones with hearts of men.” I wondered what had happened to me; I had once found those lines beautiful and now I thought them obscene. Worshipping stones, wasn’t that idolatry? Stones, places, nations. I tried to feel some of the old piety, but instead I looked around. The woman behind me wore a black headscarf that entirely covered her hair, a long black skirt, and a long-sleeved, high-necked maroon shirt. She was lightly moustached and sweating visibly and stood behind a man in a wheelchair who must have been her son. His arms were unusually short and bent at the elbows like wings, his face was slightly spastic, and his eyes were afraid. I wondered if she had come to pray for him.

  Beyond me, women in long dresses and headscarves pressed their foreheads to the wall. Behind me, another group clustered around their cheap white plastic chairs and passed around pastry and small plastic cups of water, as if they were having a tea party. Beside me, another woman was barely visible, collapsed on her own lap so you could see just her headscarf and a bit of her skirt, her bags piled at her feet. It was very hot, and the platform seemed to magnify the heat. A woman in a sleeveless black dress, a lace shawl pulled across her shoulders for modesty, dialed her cellphone and said, “Yossi! Guess where I am? I’m at the Wall, Yossi, at the Wall. Pray, Yossi, pray!” She held the cellphone to the sweating stones.