Arabic for Beginners

by Ariela Freedman

  She left some money on the table. I scooped it up and handed it back to her.

  “Fine,” she said, a little angrily, “but I’ll get it next time.”

  As she walked down the street I noticed that she led with her head, squinting and always tilting a little forward, as if she was at once leaning into the future and flinching in anticipation of it.

  I was frustrated all afternoon, and I couldn’t figure out why. Everything rubbed me raw. The streets looked dirty, and the traffic was even louder than usual, the people ruder, the day more wasted. I tried to shake it off, like a horse shakes off flies, but the feeling persisted. It was like a stain, this off-colour feeling, and everything felt desolate though nothing had changed.

  When Simon got home, I asked him, “Do you think my friendship with Jenna is anthropological?”

  “I don’t know what that means,” he said, but then he softened. “No. I think you’re friends with her because you like her. And part of liking someone is being curious about them. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Anyway, you like women like Jenna. You’ve always had friends like that.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “You know. Women with drama.”

  “No,” I said. “I hate drama.”

  “You hate having drama. But you like people with drama.” Then he started listing old friends and former friends until I begged him to stop. Sometimes I forgot how well he knew me. I couldn’t fool him, and I couldn’t fool myself when I talked to him, he had known me for too long. I had honestly forgotten about Lila, Andrea, Cindy—the various women I befriended right around the times they blew up their lives.

  That week Bella couldn’t pick us up, so I shared a taxi with Shayna. We both forgot to take the address, and after circling in the taxi for a few minutes we decided to have the driver drop us off in the general vicinity of the school. It was a mixed Muslim and Jewish neighbourhood, one of very few in Jerusalem. We saw a lighted courtyard and heard snatches of conversation and song. Inside the courtyard

  was a group of teenage boys, and they stopped talking when I leaned over.

  “Where is Yad V’yad?” I asked, and one of them said, “Over there.” He gestured with his hand, but the others stared at us in sullen silence. As we walked away, we heard laughter, and a song rising to follow us. I couldn’t quite hear it, but Shayna gripped my arm and pulled me forward. “Just keep going,” she said. About half a block away, the words came into focus, “Maaaa-vet l’aravim,” “Death to Arabs.” He chanted in a traditional tune, the way you would chant a line of the Torah, and he had a pure voice, a cantor’s voice. I pulled back and Shayna gripped my arm tighter.

  “It isn’t going to help anything,” she said.

  Ahead of us was the school, lit up in the dark like a spaceship. A modernist architect had been commissioned to build this low, swooping structure in the middle of the green; there were bridges to signify the bridges that would be built among communities, large open windows to let in light and air. But it didn’t fit with the modest stone row houses of the neighbourhood. We had been just a block away, but we had needed to turn the corner to see the building, glowing and silent and almost empty.

  I was furious. How could everyone pretend that living like this was normal? I remembered once waiting on the platform of the subway in New York, on a foul August city day. The train was late and the platform was hazy—a fug of heat and sweat and foul temper. I kept thinking I could see rats in the shadows of the rails, and whether I could see them or not I knew that the rats were down there. A skinny black man was whooping and gesticulating by one of the pillars. He lifted one leg like a crane, and then kicked into the air. He twisted from the waist, like he was wringing himself out, and let out a series of staccato grunts. Everyone was pretending not to look at him while tracking him warily, both out of curiosity and in an attempt to preserve their own safety, in case his performance suddenly turned more aggressive and violent. An invisible cordon sanitaire surrounded him, maybe two body lengths long on each side, as if everyone had together decided exactly how much space to keep between themselves and whatever madness he was carrying. Suddenly, he stopped his display or his calisthenics or whatever it was that he was doing, and stood still and looked straight at me. His clothing had all faded to the same dead shade of dull black.

  “Y’all just pretending you don’t want to jump out of your own skin,” he said. His eyes were coals. “Y’all just like me, don’t think you ain’t.”

  He raised his arms again, elbows chest high, and started the twisting movements, and this time it looked almost like a private exorcism, and the train pulled into the station and everyone but him got on it.

  16.

  Though we had been in Jerusalem for three months, we barely knew any Israelis. It was too easy to join the community of immigrants and to float along the surface of the city. There were so many of us, especially in Jerusalem. In the streets I heard English and French; at the beach, French and Russian. Besides, the Israelis were all so busy, often working two jobs, trying to keep up in a country with low wages and an ever-rising cost of living. The Israel I remembered from my youth was austere and isolated. There weren’t many imported products on the shelves, and most people lived modestly. Even the toilet paper was rough and poor. But the new Israel was hectic with acquisition, the stores overflowing with the same cornucopia of crap that I could get back home. Everyone complained about it, but nobody really wanted to go back to the old days.

  Leah was one of the few Israeli mothers in the daycare. She intimidated me, though I really didn’t know her well. When I first met her, I thought that perhaps she was one of the teachers. She projected authority. The first time she ever spoke to me she ordered me to give her my telephone number and my email, before she’d even introduced herself or asked my name. She was Class Mother, though I wasn’t sure how real the position was, or if it carried with it the power she seemed to assume, of corralling the parents and telling them all how to behave.

  The first time we arrived at the daycare, Leah had been sitting in a chair in front of the door, taking names and email addresses. By our second week she had put us on a rotation, helping the teachers at recess. During our third week she had told us each exactly what to bring for the holiday celebration. She should have been a general. Her talents were wasted on us.

  Several months later Simon asked, “Do the classes even have class mothers?” “That didn’t even occur to me,” I said. “I don’t know.” Perhaps it was a fiction, like the time later that year when she told us that her brother had the ear of the Minister of Defence and would help implement our suggestions for ending the war. But equally, it might have been true.

  When she told me that our sons were going to have a play date, it felt like an order.

  “We will take you to our house,” she said. “I have an extra car seat. They will eat an egg and then they will play. We will drive you home at four o’clock.”

  If the weather was fine, we might go to the park. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I acquiesced. It seemed rude to do anything else in the face of her certainty.

  She had large tragic dark eyes, heavily and inexpertly lined, and a face that might have looked soft without

  makeup but with makeup looked harsh. And old: I wasn’t sure how old she was, I just knew that she seemed an adult in a way that I was not, the weight of the world heavy on her rounded shoulders. She was tall and also heavy in an exaggerated, womanly fashion—pouched eyes and cheeks, full chest and hips. She wore tight clothes a size or two too small; her black pants cut in at the hip, and her majestic bosom spilled out of her jewel-coloured V-necked tops.

  Her son was four years old and was her second child, from a second marriage; her first son was seventeen and lived with her first husband. She was separated from her second husband, and they were currently going through a slow, acrimonious divorce. Her son had a huge, moony smile
, a big head, and a skinny, tiny body. In many ways, he seemed her opposite: timid, pale, slight. When I first met him I thought perhaps he was a little delayed—he had that slight epicanthic slant to his eyes, that broad head too heavy for his body, a goofy undirected smile. I saw his mirror when his father dropped him off one day, a rooster of a man with a large bald head and a barnyard strut.

  She said to me once, “Tal’s father is a bad person, but he is a genius and also a genius in bed.”

  Her voice was deep and full, and her English sounded gruff. Her Hebrew was beautiful and resonant, though I only caught every other sentence. Leah’s aggressiveness and Tal’s shyness formed a sharp contrast: she was the hawk and he was the white mouse.

  Our sons rarely played together. At that point, my son had formed a little clique with the other English speakers in the class—embassy brats, UN kids, interracial internationalists. When the class ended at one in the afternoon and they spilled out onto the lawn in front of the daycare, they looked like an old Benetton ad. But Leah had decreed that our sons would have a play date, and in a way I admired that she was looking out for Tal; he was too timid to make friends on his own, and often seemed to play in the corners of the room, ensconced inside imaginary worlds.

  After school that day, Leah was waiting for us and took us to her car, parked in the lot behind the YMCA. It was held together by rust and duct tape, and the two car seats in the back looked like they might date from the early eighties. The car smelled like cigarette smoke and sour milk. The back seat was littered with candy wrappers, plastic bags, old toys; in the front the dashboard was covered with a thick film of dust.

  Her son and my son were buckled in—I couldn’t manage the unfamiliar clasp, and with a snort she leaned over me and did it, her hot breath on my neck—and they babbled to each other in their respective languages, perfectly happy, mutually uncomprehending. Leah put the key in the ignition and said, “I hope that this time the car will start.” There was a low rattle as the car pulled out, accompanied by lights on the dashboard that she seemed to ignore.

  She said, “This car is so old, only the Arabs know how to fix it. I take it to East Jerusalem. A Jewish would not know what to do with it. They would say, ‘Throw it in the garbage,’ but I have no money to buy a new one.” We turned onto Gaza Street, where the traffic was barely moving.

  She announced, “Today, I am very upset. This morning his father sent me a letter saying he will pay me no more money. So what will I do? I have looked for a job, but I tell them, ‘I have a child, I will not work overtime, there are only certain hours I am willing to do,’ so who will hire me?” She jerked her head towards the back seat, and lowered her voice to a pitch that anyone else would have considered loud.

  “He doesn’t want to pay me anymore. I have to go to court again. I was on the phone with my lawyer all morning. I am sorry, when we get to my house I need to make some more phone calls.” She switched into Hebrew, and I tried to follow, but I was distracted by the way she moved in and out of lanes with the elbowing, signal-less certainty of a bully in line. That was why I couldn’t quite translate a word that sounded familiar.

  “You what?”

  “We fled.”

  She leaned forward over the wheel like a race car driver and said, “He beat me. We went to my parents. I live with my parents. And they are too old for this, for a small child in the house, but they took me in. I had nowhere else to go! It is very difficult. It is not ideal, but what can I do: I have no job, I have no money, I am all by myself, and I need to look after him. Who will pick him up from school if I go to work? I am looking for a part-time job but I am too old. And I don’t know what to do, because now Tal is afraid of his father, he doesn’t want to go with him on weekends, he cries and cries, and I am worried that maybe he hits him. But I have no choice, because of the judge. And he has told the judge that I’m crazy, that I’m not fit, he’s made up all kinds of lies about me.”

  She suddenly cut in front of a grey Saturn, and sped away to a chorus of honks.

  “Hannah, you might have to testify for me, I need people to tell the judge I’m not crazy.”

  Leah pulled into the parking lot of a flat, white apartment building.

  Her English was fluid, and she spoke through her mistakes so that they seemed somehow dignified due to her certainty. When I tried to speak Hebrew to her, she kept correcting me, so we switched back into English. But I hadn’t said much, even though this was our first conversation; it didn’t even seem like she was talking to me as much as to some sounding board for her grievances, for her life that she laid out so bare and lurid, like a carcass on a hook. She hauled her son and then my son out of the car. “We go upstairs now.”

  The apartment entrance was full of plants, clustered under a small skylight, overgrown and luxuriant amidst the oriental rugs and dark bookshelves. It looked like the apartment of an intellectual, an academic, or a writer: the universal language of carpets and books and shabby gentility. As soon as we came inside she told us to take off our shoes; before we sat down she was cleaning up, straightening a newspaper on the table, scooping a plastic toy off the floor. She looked down at a pair of jogging pants and underpants shed like snakeskin on the Oriental rug, picked them up, and yelled, “Tal!”

  He came running from the hallway. He was completely bare except for his shirt, and laughing. He had a flat bottom and skinny bow-legs, and, to my surprise, he was uncircumcised.

  “Tal, why are your pants off? Put them back on!”

  Tal looked mutinous, and started to run away. Leah picked him up and his feet kept running, like those characters in cartoons who don’t realize that they are already off the cliff. She tried to slide his pants back on and he kicked her. She dropped him and he disappeared back down the hallway.

  “You see how it is for me? Raising him with no father.”

  My son appeared in the hallway, holding a red car half as big as he was, vanished into a doorway again. Leah said, “Now we’ll have some tea,” and backed into the small kitchen.

  The kitchen was tidy and well organized. There wasn’t much room for me so I stood in a corner by the doorway while she boiled the water and wiped the countertop. A man came into the room. He was shirtless, big-bellied, and had suspenders hanging from the waistband of his pants down to his knees. “This is my father,” Leah said. “Abba. Abba!” She turned to me and shrugged. “He isn’t wearing his hearing aids.” She swept a pair of flesh-coloured buttons from the counter and held them out to him, her palm open. I had noticed the intimate, curled shape of them earlier without registering what they were. “Abba, put your hearing aids in.”

  He ignored her, and leaned into the fridge, his stomach threatening to tip him over. He pulled out a plate covered in Saran wrap, grabbed a fork from the dish-rack, lumbered out of the kitchen, looking down all the while. It wasn’t that he didn’t say hello; it was as if he hadn’t even seen us. Down the hallway, I heard a door slam.

  “Pass me the tea that you would like,” Leah said. I couldn’t find the tea at all, and she gestured towards a drawer, then impatiently reached over me and yanked it open. All the while she talked over the hiss of the kettle.

  “I have a boyfriend now, in Ma’ale Adumim. Can you imagine me with a boyfriend in the territories? I tell him, I could never live there. But that is not the problem. The problem is he has a son and the son is very disabled, he has serious problems. So, you know. It is a big problem,” she said. “Because that kid will eat all our money. It will always have to be his son first. Not me, or my son. Well, my sons, but my other son is already almost an adult, he is going to the army this year. I was married before, you know. To a diplomat. Also a genius. We lived in Brazil together. After we broke up he moved to Switzerland. My son went with him. When my son came back, he told me I was vulgar. What can I do? We have all become vulgar here.”

  “Let’s go outside,” she said, pointing to the large
balcony. Her son had returned from his bedroom, still in just his long shirt, the skinny gooseflesh of his legs exposed. “Put your pants on!” she ordered and he stood there shaking his head, braced to run. She bent down and caught him and as he struggled in her arms she seemed to change her mind and loosened her grip. “You will be cold,” she warned, opening the sliding doors and ushering us out.

  The day was overcast, and there was nowhere to sit. The balcony was immense, almost as large as the living room, and lined with wilted geraniums; you could see the highway, and beyond it, the green of the university campus. I leaned on the railing, shivering, while the boys rode tricycles and plastic cars in circles and Leah disappeared inside. I wanted to be let back in, to be offered a cup of tea, to be allowed to sit on the low sofas and eat tangerines from the bowl on the coffee table. But it was clear that I had been sent outside to watch the children while Leah did whatever she was doing inside; through the window I heard snatches of a rapid, one-sided conversation, and assumed she was talking on the phone.

  Tal careened around in a plastic Flintstone car, his legs the motor. My son, meantime, was chasing him and trying to climb onto the roof of the toy car while it was still in motion. The car was irresistible and unsharable. I tried to negotiate with them, but they paid no attention to me. Leah came outside as they both were crying and yanked her son out of the seat. My son stopped wailing and sat in the driver’s position, his face smiling though still wet with tears. Tal wailed for another few minutes, then mounted his tricycle, still bare-assed and shivering.

  “I had to call my lawyer,” Leah said. “Sam, would you like to see Tal’s room? Time to come inside.” The boys followed her, no more inclined to disobey than I would have been. “Now put your pants on!” she said to Tal, gesturing towards the pair of sweatpants, empty and formless on the rug.