“Sharafna!” he said when they dropped the ritual end piece. “sharafna! How pleased we all are to meet each other. Kul tamaam.” The pleasantries were important. Salem said that if you didn’t use them, you weren’t just rude; you weren’t even really speaking the language. He was trying to socialize us, and we needed it, desperately.
One of the boys, the green-eyed one, had grown up near Abu Tor and had a perfect accent, with breathy chs and glottal ayins. You used so much of your throat, it felt conspicuous. But of course I had to keep in mind that failing to pronounce those elongated vowels, those airy consonants, was far more blatant. It was hard to imagine myself a stranger in a language, though I was a stranger in all but one language. I thought of the many times I had made eye-blink judgments based on a thick accent or a careless sentence structure. And yet I willingly tumbled into Arabic, unashamed, the wrong sounds tripping off my tongue as lightly as if they were correct.
The only other man in the class was named Moshe. He was pudgy and bearded, and wore a small crocheted kippa. He had served in the army for three years and was a week away from miluim. When we asked him why he was taking the class he said, “I want to learn how to say something in Arabic other than, ‘Get out of the car,’ and, ‘Put your hands on the hood or I’ll shoot.’”
Army soldiers were taught a little bit of Arabic; they called it “machsomite.” “Checkpoint language.” Machsomite was a language that consisted only of commands. “Open your bag. Take the car seat out of the car. Step outside. Hands up.”
A friend of mine had served three years in the army. Later, while living in London, he’d taken an Arabic class to refine his language skills and increase his vocabulary. He didn’t know why the teacher looked at him so coldly—he hadn’t mentioned his army service to anyone—until one day she said, “Please, you need to stop addressing me in the imperative.” He hadn’t realized there was any other tense.
Soldiers often hitchhiked on the long bare stretches of road around the army bases. Hitchhiking was a relic of the early days of the state, when the roads were empty, and gas was dear.
“Say Pepsi,” drivers would demand when they stopped to pick up young men, as a way of checking if they were Israeli, since “p” was a consonant that didn’t exist in Arabic. It was a shibboleth, a way of exposing foreigners, after the story in Judges about the war between the Ephraimites and Gileadites. The Ephraimites were defeated, and the Gileadites blocked the crossing at the river Jordan. “Say shibboleth,” they’d say when men came to ford the river, and if a man said “sibboleth” they killed him. Forty-two thousand were found that way, and each one drowned in the Jordan.
We were surrounded by shibboleths; they were everywhere.
Salem told us jokes in Yiddish. We drank tea and listened to him patiently repeat the same lessons over and over again. He brought herbs from his garden—something I’d never tasted before, a little bit like lemon and a little bit like mint—and we steeped them in hot water, adding large spoonfuls of sugar. The sugar was to keep us awake.
Our pace was very slow, and soon we lost half our students—the reservist with the short beard, the two boys who biked from Hebrew University. Only women were left in the class now. Me and my friend Shayna. Lynn from New Zealand, who was learning Arabic because she sometimes needed it for her work on a sexual assault hotline. And Bella, of course. She was the retiree I’d spoken to that first day, the volunteer for Machsom Watch. She came to pick us up for class sometimes, and we waited for her on the dark corner while the headlights streaked by. She was a nervous driver, and leaned forward towards the wheel. Bella was slow in class, but diligent. I was fast, but lazy.
Salem was painfully patient, but I thought he’d privately given up on us some time before. As the term went on, he told more stories and anecdotes in his fluid Hebrew in between our stilted efforts in Arabic. “Did you see the boy?” “Is your car broken?” “I am going to the airport.” “I went to America on my vacation.” “I do not speak Spanish.”
I liked the many modes of greeting: “good morning,” “bright morning,” “rose morning,” “jasmine morning.” I liked it that when someone fed you, you “blessed their hands.”
As well as a language teacher, Salem had been a tour guide in Jerusalem for twenty years. When he first took the course, there were very few Arab tour guides; he studied hard, said he knew the subject cold, but when he went to the tourism ministry to check his results he was told he’d failed the exam. He asked to see his test, and they wouldn’t show it to him. He took the test three times, and failed again and again. The third time, a secretary took pity on him and showed him his exam. He had a near-perfect score. He confronted her supervisor, and she said there must have been a mistake, and sullenly, reluctantly granted him his license.
He rarely spoke about himself. We knew he had a wife, a home, two daughters, apricot trees that bloomed in season. But this story about the tourism ministry was the most intimate thing he had ever confided in us. We all sat in silence. What was there to say?
He was disappointed in us. We didn’t do our homework, stalled when he asked us questions, were weeks behind where we should have been in the textbook. Next week, we would say. Next week we’ll catch up. Next week we’ll be prepared. “Bukra fil mishmish,” he said, and we asked him what he meant. “It means, ‘Tomorrow, in apricot season,’ ” he said.
“How shall I explain? It means, ‘It’s never going to happen.’ Because apricot season is so short, it’s over almost before it’s even begun. So if someone says they’re going to pay you back, for example, you might say, ‘Bukra fil mishmish,’ meaning, ‘You’re never going to do it.’ ” We said no, no, we meant it. We were going to do it. We would be better the next time.
I tried to speak Arabic in the market. It took about five minutes to get to the limits of my conversational ability. I could buy things: when I didn’t know the names, I pointed like a two-year-old and said, “That, please.” The possessive was built into the names of objects; “my car,” “my house,” “my child,” each a single word. I was trying to be wary of drawing sociological cues from the rules of the language, but if I had, it would have been something like this: Everything in this culture belongs to somebody. There are no objects without ownership.
When I came home after Arabic class, Simon was usually already asleep, or pretending to be asleep. He didn’t ask me about my day; I didn’t ask him about his work. Sometimes I thought it might be less lonely to be, in fact, alone.
14.
All my life, I had been told I belonged to Israel. But the reverse was also implied: I belonged to Israel because Israel belonged to me. Throughout my childhood, Israel was the lost dream and the true homeland. We studied modern Hebrew, we sang the Israeli anthem at camp and school events, that song about a cry in the heart. We prayed to the east. We sent money to Israel, cheques in paper envelopes that would be planted there in the form of trees and forests, like a reverse metamorphosis, the paper turning back into bark.
I bought it all. In my youth I went back again and again. At camp I sang Hebrew words to old Polish melodies under Adirondack stars. I would return to Israel, I would complete the aliya that my parents had aborted, I would raise my own family there. I had the kind of clarity about it that only belonged to the reckless imaginings of my youth, when my future was sharp-edged and shadowless.
Back then, I could have never met Jenna. I could never have even imagined Jenna, or anyone like Jenna. Her Jerusalem was a place I had never been and it did not fit, it did not fit at all, with the homeland of my childhood.
I was not a child anymore.
“Come over after we drop off the kids,” Jenna said. “We’ll have some breakfast, and I’ll show you the orchard near my house—in Arabic you call it the ‘kerem.’ That’s where we’re building our new house. There’s a little bungalow there now, but we have big plans—three stories, a garage.”
Pigeons w
ere clustering around a handful of crumbs on the marble stairs outside, their heads vanished into a bustle of backside and wing, and Noor charged at them to watch them scatter. Jenna looked tired, smoked nervously, her hand trembling.
“The kids all came into bed with me last night,” she said. “I stayed up late, waiting for Aden. I made him a special supper and everything, maqluba—have you ever had it? —eggplant and meat and rice, like his mother makes it. I can tell you, it’s a pain in the ass to cook. He didn’t get home until eleven, and then when we finally sat down to eat his cellphone rang, it’s his friend, asking him to come out, and he can’t never say no to his friends, they pressure him. So he just left, and then I guess he slept in the house we have in the kerem. When he’s not in bed all the kids come into bed with me. When I woke up, Noor was lying right across the bed like this, and Zac was kicking my ribs, and pulling Aisha’s hair, and Aisha was crying, I swear these kids are going to kill me.”
For all that her driving terrified me—Noor climbing in and out of the front seat, a book balanced on the steering wheel—Jenna was confident in the car. We drove north, past the Old City walls, and along the hills I could glimpse the half-finished grey mass of the wall, the cranes and diggers miniaturized like toy trucks in the distance.
“I know some people who live right there,” Jenna said, gesturing towards the houses that huddled near the wall. “They were so happy when they built the wall. Their property values went up, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Anyway, they don’t like the people on the other side. A lot of criminals, you know, a lot of thieving. But they just climb over now, anyway. Like those kids—but at least, you know, their prices are better.”
She gestured at the children running towards the car window. We had stopped at an intersection, and some Palestinian children ran up to us, clutching cigarettes and packets of gum. I couldn’t imagine how they came over that steep, intransigent wall. Big-eyed and skinny, like my sons, they ran through traffic as if it was an obstacle course. Jenna rolled down the window, handed them a bill, and took a few packs of cigarettes with her long, pale fingers. Noor reached into her open purse and grabbed a fistful of bills, reached for the window too. Jenna caught her chubby fist, twisted the money back.
“Did you see that? Did you see that? She likes to throw money out the window, I mean, literally. She threw out a hundred shekels yesterday! Aden says I’m always losing money, but I swear it’s not my fault.” We pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall—white, shiny, new. “This is where I go to shop,” Jenna said, “and my bank is here too. It’s more high class than the places in my neighbourhood.”
It didn’t look high class. It looked like a strip mall. Everyone in the bank was speaking Hebrew. Jenna stood in line, handed the teller a wad of cash, Noor on her hip.
Her phone rang, and she picked it up.
“Yes, yes, I’m there right now.” She closed the phone. “He’s driving me crazy,” she said. “He doesn’t trust me.”
She pulled up again to buy long, narrow loops of bread from a street stand, and then drove up the hill to her house. The road was gouged in the centre for the tramline that had been under construction for the last three years. The street signs had changed from Hebrew to Arabic, and the buildings were lower and more spread out. On Jenna’s corner there was an abandoned dirt lot strewn with garbage: abandoned television sets, plastic bags, broken bicycles.
“Disgusting,” Jenna said. “The people here love to throw their garbage in the street.”
She pulled up in front of a low bungalow. The house she rented had a large concrete patio, with an overhanging roof that had been half demolished. You could see the rebar protruding out of the concrete like broken bone. Beside the house was a pit and in the pit their neighbour’s house was crushed and sunken like a shipwreck. I leaned over and saw the rusted carcass of an automobile in the rubble and plastic chairs upside down, their legs sticking up in the air like insects trapped on their backs.
“Two years it’s been like that,” Jenna said. “It’s a pain in the ass. The children want to go play down there—they try to jump over the wall. It isn’t our house, at least. They started to break down this one, too, but then they stopped. I guess the landlord paid his taxes or talked them into it or something. He was supposed to fix the roof, but he doesn’t do anything.”
She unlocked the door, and we stepped into the cool shade of the house. Heavy curtains were drawn against the sun; the furniture was brocaded in shiny fabrics that reminded me of my grandmother’s apartment in Brooklyn, when I was a child. On the wall was a massive picture of a boat in a gilded frame; when I came closer I could see that what I had mistaken for a kind of pointillism was actually a jigsaw puzzle, a reproduction of a Monet, broken up into tiny cardboard pieces and reassembled.
“My mother did that,” she said, looking at me looking at the picture. “It’s, like, a million pieces. We do those puzzles together. That was the last time she came to visit. And what was I going to do, break it apart after all that work?”
The house was smaller than I expected—there was one large room, kitchen and dining and living room at once, heavily furnished and dark, and then two bedrooms, both strewn with blankets, pillows, and toys. Jenna opened a closet to take out another basket of toys for Noor and had to push her hip against the door to wedge it back shut. She put spreads out on the counter—labne, hummus, salty fried eggplant. She made us sweet strong tea and smoked while she watched me eat.
“I’m never really hungry in the mornings,” she said.
We heard the scratching of a key in the door, and a woman let herself in. She was swathed in layers of skirts and shawls, and a scarf was draped around her face. She was broad, and her layers made her seem monumental, like a draped statue. She smiled at Noor, and gold glinted in the corners of her smile. Jenna got up and kissed her on the cheek. “This is my mother-in-law,” she said. “Ummi, Hannah’s studying Arabic. Say something to her in Arabic.”
“Ismi Hannah,” I said, stupidly.
She leaned on the counter, picked up a piece of eggplant with her fingers, and lowered it into her mouth. The eggplant was slick with oil.
“Hannah,” She said. “Hannah—Jannah. Jannah—Hannah. Very nice.” She laughed. In her voice, our names were almost the same. I had never noticed that strange propinquity.
She kept darting glances at me under lowered eyelids, as if she didn’t want me to catch her watching me. When she saw I’d noticed she smiled at me again, tight-lipped this time.
“She really doesn’t know any English,” Jenna said. She said something to her mother-in-law, a stream of Arabic so fluid that I could only pick out a few words, like sticks rushing by in fast water—“son,” and “friend,” and “school.”
“I told her that our kids go to the Y together,” Jenna said, “but she knew that already. She likes to spy on me.” I looked at her mother-in-law, worried that she’d heard, but she just smiled at me again, picking her teeth. Jenna noticed my empty plate and the tea that I had drunk to the bitter dregs.
“Shall we go to the kerem?”
Her mother-in-law followed us to the car, locking the door of the house ceremonially behind us. After the shade of the house the midday sun hurt. The cul-de-sac, with one house standing and the other buried in the pit, felt like the very end of the city, the end of the world; a dirt road led further into the hills. Jenna took a pair of sunglasses out of her purse; Noor grabbed them off her face, tried to perch them on her own small nose, cried when they slid off.
“She wants everything,” Jenna said. I offered Jenna’s mother-in-law the front passenger seat, and she and Jenna both shook their heads; we bumped up the hill and navigated two switchbacks and a gate. Jenna’s mother-in-law got out of the car and slowly, fussily opened the latch. She stood back while Jenna swung the car around and backed in. “She isn’t allowed to drive up here on her own anymore,” Jenna said.
“She can’t handle it. She kept driving right into the gate.”
“Why a gate?” I said. It had seemed more elaborate than anything this hillside could require: solid high unscalable bars, lights along the top like a prison. The other lots on the hillside were also enclosed, but for the most part with chain link fences, lower and less forbidding.
“People kept breaking in.” Jenna said. “The first time Aden built a house here on our lot, they blew it up. He didn’t want them to blow up this house too.” She nodded at the low bungalow.
I said, “Why would someone blow up his house?”
“I know who it was,” Jenna said.
Jenna’s mother-in-law drew a broom, a mop, and a bucket out of the car, and headed to the bungalow. The exaggerated swivel of her hips and her broad back seemed somehow a rebuke. “She still cleans his house for him,” Jenna said, “and he’s thirty years old. Can’t clean up after himself. And I refuse. Bad enough that he comes here and watches TV with his friends when he should be home with me. I’m not cleaning up after all those men. I told him that a long time ago. Anyway, all this is coming down when we build our new house. We’re just waiting on the permits. Do you want to see?” She swung open the door. Her mother-in-law was polishing the counters with a rag and did not look up. A hallway kitchen, a bathroom, a room with a sofa and large television.
“It’s bigger than our TV at home,” Jenna said. “He sleeps out here sometimes, when it’s too late to come home. I mean, you saw it, it takes five minutes, but in the dark you’ll go right off the side of the mountain. No lights.”
She held out a bag. “I brought us some fruit. Shall we go back outside? It depresses me in here.” She called back to her mother-in-law over her shoulder, “I don’t know why you’d want to stay in the dark on a beautiful day,” and her mother-in-law, uncomprehending, flashed us her gold smile.
Arabic for Beginners Page 8