The cracks of the wall overflowed with notes. I’d often wondered about what happened to them; they seemed like a cornucopia, endlessly replete. Simon told me they were swept up and burned at night. Obama had recently visited the Wall, and his note was stolen by a reporter and printed in the paper. “Protect my family,” he wrote, “and guard me from pride and despair.” It was so much the right thing to say that it made me wonder if he’d known it would be read.
I stood in front of the Wall with a pencil and my notebook. I didn’t believe that the Wall was some kind of telegram to the divine, didn’t think those were anything but pieces of paper, the motley scraps and wishes of a single day. But I was too nervous not to write. I might as well try to believe, like Pascal’s Wager; I had nothing to lose. “Protect everyone,” I scrawled quickly, “and please make me be happy.” On the way home the boys played hide and seek among the Roman pillars. I wished I could believe in God again so I could have a God to protect them. Otherwise,
I was far too vulnerable, with those children at the mercy of the vast and indifferent spinning world.
The next day, my mother’s cousin Shira visited us from Tel Aviv. Drinking tea on the cheap black leather couches, she lifted her penciled eyebrows dramatically when I told her we’d gone into the market.
“And why not have a nice Arab slip a knife right into your back,” she trilled, in her high, accented English.
“It’s fine,” I said, “totally safe. And fine.”
Her eyebrows rose even higher. “You do what you want,” she said, in a tone that implied that what I wanted would always be precisely the wrong thing to do. “Why listen to an old lady like me?”
12.
And what would Shira have thought of Jenna? I knew better than to tell her where I planned to go the next day.
When Jenna told me that she had to go to the police station, I offered to accompany her. I thought I might be useful—I spoke Hebrew and she didn’t, and besides, I was afraid of what would happen if she went without a translator, or a witness. She wasn’t worried; she just wanted company. She treated it like it would be a morning out, while I had nightmares for three days running.
Jenna was going to the police station to complain about a series of obscene phone calls that she had received at her house. It was a man’s voice, and she was pretty sure he knew her. She said that from his accent she could tell he was from her family. He said filthy things, but she refused to say what they were—“You know,” she said, looking away, brushing her hands on her shirt as if she was brushing off dirt. He called late at night, often two or three times, and always while Aden was out, so it seemed he had some way of knowing she was alone. The calls were starting to scare her.
Jenna’s family extended across Shuafat and lived in both the refugee camp and the houses around it. Lowlifes, mostly, she said. Drug addicts, terrorists, hicks. It surprised me when she spoke of her family that way.
They had a particular accent when they spoke Arabic, and it was that accent, the dips and intonations of her childhood, which she recognized in the whispered obscenities in the phone calls that came late at night. “Why would someone from your family hassle you like that?” I said, and she said, “That’s just what they’re like. You don’t know them.” But I had the feeling that there was something she wasn’t telling me.
We went to the police straight from the daycare. Noor wouldn’t sit in a car seat. Instead she wandered around and tried to clamber over the back of the driver’s seat and onto her mother’s lap.
“Jenna,” I said, “do you want me to buckle Noor in?”
“No,” Jenna said. “I tried that. She’ll just cry.”
“I can’t believe you can drive around here without buckling your kid in,” I said. “In America, you’d get arrested.”
“I would never get a ticket for that,” Jenna said. “It’s different here. Everyone does it.” In America, Britney Spears had just been caught by paparazzi, driving with her young son in the front, unbuckled and without a car seat. The media had been outraged, as they were at all displays of maternal negligence, which got so much more attention than bad fathers, since no one expected any better from them.
Noor grabbed a can of Red Bull from the cup holder next to the driver’s seat and started to swig it like a truck driver. She picked up her mother’s purse and began to cry when she couldn’t unzip it. Jenna reached back without looking and grabbed the purse back, and Noor started to cry louder but without much fervour, all smoke and no heat. “No, Noor!” Jenna said loudly, and then in a lower tone to me, “Is that the police station?” She made a sloppy left turn across oncoming traffic into the lot. The sign said, “Mishmar Hagvul.”
“Jenna, this is border patrol,” I said. “This isn’t what we want.”
Border patrol looked like a parking lot. There was a woman in a glass booth, a long, low building, and an expanse of asphalt. Guards dressed in dark green paced back and forth. I was sure that they would throw us out of the country. The line between permitted and forbidden, between welcome and exiled, was so faint. I couldn’t believe that Jenna trusted the border guards more than I did.
“They’ll tell us how to get to the police station,” she said, and pulled up by the soldier who had begun to walk towards us. The soldier was a woman; her small frame seemed weighed down by her security vest and by the Uzi hanging from her hip. Jenna slid open the window and Noor grinned toothlessly at the soldier.
That baby was totally indiscriminate, would smile at anyone.
“We’re looking for the police station,” Jenna said, and I waited for us all to be arrested for illegal immigration, or at the very least, for driving without our seat belts. Though we had done nothing, I was certain we were guilty.
“What a sweetie!” the soldier said, smiling at Noor. She gestured back to the road, “Take a right on Route 1.”
I felt sick. Noor finished the Red Bull and threw the can between the seats.
“I told you they wouldn’t care,” Jenna said. “Now I remember where the station is.”
As we drove out of the city centre Noor started crying again, and Jenna pulled her between the seats and onto her lap as she drove, releasing a small brown breast. Noor settled into the snuffling, satisfied sounds of nursing. Jenna smoked, drove, and nursed. Smoking punctuated Jenna’s life; she seemed to exist in the interstices between cigarettes, the way that people had begun to live in the moments between checking their email. Smoking kept her thin and nervous, her long, nicotine-stained fingers trembling at the wheel.
Spending time with Jenna made me realize that back home, none of my friends smoked anymore. And all of my friends, every one of them, would have been appalled at Jenna’s behaviour. When they became parents they instantly turned into puritans. The wilder they had been, the stricter they now were. They quit smoking, quit drinking; not only would they not smoke in front of their children, if a man was smoking on the street they would glare at him as if he was a war criminal. They started buying organic food, used water filters on their taps and air filters in their homes, since North American air and water were no longer clean enough for them. They subjected their houses to inquisitions in which every dangerous object was unearthed and expunged; one friend had even told another to get rid of her houseplants.
I tried to imagine their reaction to Jenna, the way Jenna let her children play with her cigarettes, or ride in the car unbuckled. It was a little like safety was a myth she didn’t believe in. When I couldn’t help myself, and some word of warning bubbled out of my mouth, she would look at me as if I was childishly naive, as if I had no understanding of the difference between real and false danger.
And I could understand that. For all of our careful parental pursuit of security, we could not keep our children safe. The organic baby food and the obsessive baby proofing had the quality of magical thinking. We might as well have hung charms against the evil eye on their d
oors, or tied red strings around their chubby wrists. I knew a child who’d swelled and sickened and died in a year, despite all efforts to save her. I knew a girl whose blood had decided she was a stranger. I lived in denial of something that Jenna seemed to understand: motherhood was a surrendering of control.
I looked out the window. We were passing the security wall, driving by a stretch that bordered right on the city. Young men with white T-shirts and blank gazes leaned against it, alone or in groups. They seemed like they had nowhere to go. They stared through us without expression, barely seeming to notice us, but as we passed them a rock skipped off the trunk like a pebble on the skin of a lake.
“They think I’m Jewish,” Jenna said. “Losers. If Aden was here, he’d show them.” Her eyes were distracted, scanning the road. “If they scratched the car, I’m going to go back there and run them over. We’re here.”
We pulled into a small white building next to a strip mall. I trailed behind Jenna, Noor on her hip. I had expected metal detectors, dramatic security, but there was only a secretary behind a messy desk, and a few bored people sitting on brown plastic chairs in the foyer.
“I have a complaint to file,” Jenna said.
“Over there,” the secretary said, without looking up from her newspaper. There was another waiting room, a smaller one, and a couple of offices with half-opened doors. The entire building had the sleepy aura of a provincial office on a Friday afternoon. Noor wandered the hallway, leaning on the plastic chairs for balance. After a while, a pudgy, walleyed man opened a door and motioned for us to come in. He wore a crocheted kippa on his balding head. It clung to a hank of hair at the side of his head and threatened to slip off entirely. His drifting eye made it difficult to see where he was looking. To my surprise, he spoke to us in English.
He beckoned us inside his office and motioned for us to sit down. My chair was a little bit broken, and I sat tentatively, afraid to settle my weight. He flipped open a pad of paper and held a pen cocked in his hand, but he didn’t write anything down as he started to ask questions.
“And what is your name?”
“Jenna. Jenna al-Masri.”
“And where do you live?”
“In Shuafat.”
“In the camp?”
“No. I have a house.”
“And this is?”
“This is my friend from Canada.”
“And how do you know English?”
“I’m from Louisiana. I’m American.”
“So what brings you to Shuafat?”
I looked around the room but there wasn’t much, just a grey metal bookcase, a few filing cabinets, a window looking out onto the parking lot. I felt stupid. Because they were speaking English there was no reason for me to be in the office. And in his focus on her I had disappeared. Even his drifting eye seemed a little more focused, a little straighter. I wondered what it was like, to walk around the world that beautiful. She seemed to take it as her due.
The officer listened to her story, then leaned back in his seat. His shirt strained at the buttons, and he stuck his thumbs into his belt loops. It couldn’t be easy to be a police officer, to sit all day and take complaints from people who didn’t trust you. I wondered if he had someone to go home to at night, to laugh with about the girl who came in that day to complain about dirty phone calls.
“As your friend,” he said, “I can tell you honestly, we can’t do much about it. We get thousands of complaints. Do you think you are the only one to get calls like this? And worse, much worse. The truth is, you’re lucky if this is all you have to complain about. It’s too expensive to sit on your phone and wait for him to call. I doubt he’s watching your house, though of course, you should call us if you see him. My advice for now is to change your number.”
He leaned forward now, more intimately, as if they really were friends.
“You know, you live in a very traditional area. You are open-minded, men see you and how you dress, you dress nice, you are pretty, no head covering, they see the nose ring, they think that you are available.” He looked at her intently. “They think you are a sharmuta, a whore. I’m just explaining to you how it is.”
Jenna half-rose in her seat, clutching Noor to her chest.
“You see how it is,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “I’m just telling you how it is.” He held the door for us as we left. “Come again if you have another problem.”
In the lot Jenna said, “I knew they wouldn’t do anything. Did you hear him call me a sharmuta?” I had never seen her so angry.
“I don’t think he was calling you a sharmuta,” I said, “I think he was saying that other people might mistake you for a sharmuta.”
She shook her head, lips tight. She was right; I had sensed it too, without wanting to name it. He was glad to call her a sharmuta, looking at her breasts under her T-shirt with his two uneven eyes, pretending a courtesy that he did not feel.
“Why don’t you change your number?” I said, getting into the car.
She looked at me as if I was an idiot. “Because I don’t want Aden to know.”
“Why not?”
“He’ll kill him if he can find him. Or he’ll kill me.”
13.
Jenna and I had decided to swap lessons: I was going to help her learn Hebrew, and she was going to help me with my Arabic. She had a primer in Hebrew transliterated into Arabic, and I had a Hebrew transliteration of Arabic; neither of us could read the other’s language. But these lessons were colloquial and casual. She’d tutor me in what to say to the young assholes who hung around making catcalls near the walls of the Old City: “inran tarbetac,” which meant “Damn your manners,” as in, “Your mother didn’t teach you to behave right.” Or “wachad uti,” which meant, “You low one, you low-class person.” Mostly she was teaching me how to curse.
But I needed more formal lessons. I decided to sign up for a class in Palestinian Arabic, and I found a friend to take the class with me. The class was held one evening a week at the bilingual school in Beit Tsafafa. The school was called Yad V’yad, which meant “hand in hand.” It was one of only a few bilingual schools in the entire country. The class was mostly meant for parents in the school so that they could try to keep up with their children’s homework, but was also open to the public. It was oddly difficult
to find beginner Arabic classes in Jerusalem; Al-Quds had a campus in the Old City somewhere, but I’d felt intimidated while trying to track it down one day among the twisting alleyways and the heavy, ornamented, and unnumbered closed doors of the Arab Quarter.
On the first day, Shayna and I shared a taxi to the empty school. Her son was in class with Gabe. Like me, she had spent a year after high school in Israel. At eighteen, I hesitated and left Israel; Shayna had leapt. Now this was her home.
We found the teacher in front of the locked door, wrestling with a keychain. The deserted school felt illicit by night. It was strange to walk down the empty corridors and flick the switch to illuminate the wide and vacant stairway, just for us.
Once in the classroom, we pulled our desks into a semi-circle and learned how to introduce ourselves. There were about seven students in the room. Our teacher’s name was Salem. He stood at the front, dressed like Mr. Rogers in his pressed slacks, tidy sweater, and the authority of his greying sideburns. Because I had once loved Mr. Rogers, I loved him immediately. I felt sorry for him, facing a desultory class of adult students late in the evening. We lacked seriousness. He was distinguished and a little weary and so obviously too good for us. He had us turn to one another and address our neighbours directly.
“My name is —. I live on — street. Pleased to meet you!”
“Esmeee —. Ana sakne fi shaaree —. Sharafna!”
The class was in Hebrew, and the textbook was transliterated into Hebrew. The family resemblance between the languages was startling; I’d been theoretica
lly prepared for that but not prepared, I suppose, for how intimate the language would feel to me. The proximity of expression made it almost more confusing than a truly alien tongue. I kept slipping into Hebrew structures, cheating by borrowing Hebrew words I already knew and shifting the accent, making them more guttural, throatier. All wrong, of course. It was like when my son put on an exaggerated Inspector Clouseau accent and claimed he was speaking French.
The woman on my right sat with a straight back and a fallen face. She wore reading spectacles with a beaded cord that draped around her shoulders. Her lipstick had been applied with a tremulous hand. Later I found out that she was a volunteer for Machsom Watch, the human rights organization that monitored the checkpoints, and was taking Arabic so she could better communicate with some of the people coming through. I asked if I could join her one morning, and she peered over her spectacles and said, “It will not make you feel good. It does not make me feel good, and I do not believe that anything has really changed, or if it has changed it has changed only for the worse. It does not make me feel good, but I have been doing it for such a long time that I no longer know how to stop.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I hadn’t been expecting such a frank answer. I kept intending to join her anyway, but somehow, all year long, I never went.
“Sharafna,” I said, the day I first met her, then turned to my right and introduced myself to an apple-cheeked New Zealander. “Sharafna.” “Nice to meet you.”
At the end of the room, two boys sat. They were college students, and ten years younger than anyone else. One of them was fascinatingly ugly: he had curly dark hair, fleshy lips, a long exaggerated nose, and pale jade-green eyes. They flushed with embarrassment as they introduced themselves to each other, and Salem leaned in to catch their exchange.
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