Arabic for Beginners

by Ariela Freedman

  Leah held her son by the shoulders and as soon as she let go he ran towards his room, looking back at her and cackling. My son looked at him, then looked at me, and followed him, the car forgotten. We walked back outside and Leah lit a cigarette. Below us was the green expanse of Givat Ram. “Over there was the partition road,” she said, pointing towards the highway. “I remember them shooting at us. I cannot forget that. And I tell you if you ask me to choose between my child and their children I choose my child, I am sorry.”

  She took a long drag on her cigarette.

  “I had a boyfriend, he was Palestinian. We lived together, before Tal’s father. Even my father liked him although my father is a religious. This is what my family is like—we are patriots, we are very high in the army. But my brother does his miluim at the checkpoint one week and then checks for human rights abuses at the same checkpoint the next week. We are all like that. My boyfriend was good to me. Then the Second Intifada came, and my boyfriend said, ‘Now we will push you Jews into the sea, but I will save you and your family, only you must become Muslim.’ That was it!”

  She stubbed out her cigarette in a tub of geraniums.

  “I left him, after that. Lunch now,” she said, and walked back inside.

  In the kitchen, Leah cracked an egg one-handed and fried it in a slick of oil, wiped the counter down, chopped tomatoes into a fine wet dice. She slid the fried egg off the pan—she had used so much oil, there was no need to unstick it with a spatula. The egg slid unctuously onto a plate, and she cracked another, all the while dicing cucumbers and tomatoes in the classic, precise style of the Israeli salad. I’d once offered to make a salad while visiting my Israeli cousin, and she’d taken one look at my hand-torn lettuce and said, “Are you making that for horses?”

  I was getting hungry, but I didn’t want to ask for food. Instead I took my cold cup of tea over to the couch while Leah put placemats on the table, called the children to lunch, pulled in their chairs, put a coaster under my cup of tea with a disapproving look.

  I picked a few pieces of tomato off Sam’s plate with my fingers. They were perfect. When I left Israel later that year, and people asked me what I missed, I thought, I miss tomatoes.

  When the boys came back into the living room Tal had managed to find a new pair of pants and now they hung droopily off his legs. “Hummus!” my son cried happily—the most Israeli thing about him. A fork had rolled off the edge of the table and onto the floor.

  “Come on,” Leah said. “Be a bit more careful!”

  Behind her Tal was taking oranges out of the bowl on the coffee table and lining them up in rows, humming “Rosh hashana, rosh hashana.” The boys were getting along well—each maintaining a constant stream of chatter in his separate language. Leah pressed a video into the VCR, and the television came to life somewhere in the middle of Beauty and the Beast.

  There was a photograph of Leah on the wall, a portrait, her face younger and softer and seeming less angry. Beside her photograph were pictures of a tall dark man in uniform—perhaps the brother she had spoken about.

  Leah noticed the oranges.

  “What is this?” she said, towering over Tal, her hands on her hips. “You need to put this all back, every one. Why do you do this? Why do you always do this kind of thing?” Tal kept his back turned to her, spacing the oranges evenly along the rim of the table. “Enough now,” she said, lifting him up and putting him on the chair beside Sam, who had already finished his omelette, and then sweeping vigorously underneath their feet.

  “This is what I tell you. If I had anywhere else to go, I would go. I would even go back to Brazil. It is very hard here, all the time. Even my son, my older son, he has become racist. He used to have a girlfriend from Ramallah! He used to have friends who were Palestinian! And now he can’t wait to go into the army, he won’t talk to his old friends, he calls his uncle, the one who does checkpoint watch, a traitor. This is not how I raised him, this is not how he was when we lived in Europe. This country, it drives people crazy. But where can I go, with no money? And besides, my life is here. Why should I have to leave?”

  “After I clean up this mess,” she said, “it will be time to go.” There was no mess, only a doily slightly askew on the television, two dishes still on the table, near three forlorn oranges.

  On the way home, I decided I was being too hard on Simon. He was doing the best he could. It was difficult to be in a new country, at a new job. I didn’t have to navigate work and nasty colleagues. I was lucky. I should be grateful. He provided for our family, that was more than Leah’s husband had done, more than a lot of men.

  I felt clear and righteous, but my resolution faded when I walked in the door. Simon’s things were strewn across the hallway, the kitchen looked like the bread basket had exploded, Gabriel was slack-jawed in front of the television, and the door to the bedroom was firmly closed. Sam dashed in front of the television—it was unusual for it to be on mid-afternoon and he could not believe his luck. I walked into the bedroom. “Hey,” Simon said without looking up, “I’m just finishing this class for tomorrow. Will you close the door, please, on your way out?”

  17.

  After Leah’s house, spending time with Jenna felt like a relief. Jenna had offered to take us to the zoo one day after school. We didn’t have a car, and the zoo was on the outskirts of the city, which made it a bus ride and a long hot walk. We could get almost everywhere in the centre of the city by foot, but that slowed our days right down, and when I think about that year it seems to me that we were always walking. The buses were slow and lurching, and while large trenches had been dug in Jaffa Road for the new light rail, it was still years from completion. I felt a little like a teenager, dependent on the kindness of friends with cars. Being a stranger in a country was already like being a child; having no car reinforced that feeling, so when Jenna drove me around I felt like a kid, though I was perhaps a decade her senior.

  Jenna had left her car in a handicapped spot outside the Y. She had the same disdain for parking rules as the consulate women did, but she didn’t have the diplomatic sticker; she harvested tickets. She pulled another one off the windshield and into a glove compartment already bristling with paper. “It drives Aden crazy,” she said, “that I get so many tickets, and then I don’t pay them. I tell him, ‘You drive the kids, and then I won’t get tickets.’ What am I supposed to do when the parking lot is full? And with all three kids?”

  When we came to the car, Zac was making a fuss—his bottle was empty, or he wanted a pacifier, something to plug his mouth. It was hard to believe he was nearly four years old. He seemed to always be sucking or crying; she was worried, she had told me, because he didn’t talk much yet. I wanted to tell her that perhaps he didn’t talk much because his mouth was always full, but I didn’t want to be that friend, the one who always knew better. And I was a little bit tentative with Jenna. She would laugh and ignore me or she would tell me to fuck off and, after all, who was I to tell anyone how to parent? She loved her children. That was clear.

  Jenna leaned over and hissed at Zac, “Inran umec itmut.”

  “It means, ‘Your mother should die,’ ” she explained to me. “But you can only say it to your own kid. Never say it to anyone else—it would be a terrible insult. Unless you want to start a war. You can also say, ‘Inran abec itmut,’ ‘Your father should die,’ but people don’t use it as often. You know, like, ‘You’re going to kill me with your behaviour, and then you’ll be sorry.’ ”

  “That’s so Jewish,” I said. “Like a caricature of a Jewish mother. ‘God, you kids are killing me! You’re going to kill your poor mother and then you’ll be happy!’ That kind of thing.”

  Jenna looked at me. “No, it’s nothing like that,” she said.

  I buckled Sam in as she slipped a DVD into the entertainment system. Dora the Explorer came on in Arabic, and from the back I could hear, “Wakaf, Swiper, Wakaf!” Zac l
eaned forward, sucking his bottle dry; he cried when it was empty, and she reached back, grabbed it, unscrewed the top, and poured the rest of her can of Red Bull inside.

  “He likes it,” she said, shrugging.

  Noor wobbled off the seat, grabbed the can, threw her head back like a sailor and tried to chug it; when nothing but a trickle came out she screwed up her face and started a fake and practiced cry too high and uniform to be unintentional. She tried to climb over the seat back onto her mother’s lap. Jenna wove in and out of traffic, leaning on her horn.

  Jenna cut in front of a small truck. “No offence,” she said, “but Jews are the worst drivers. Worse than they are in Jordan, even.” Noor reached an arm over the back seat, and Jenna pulled her over and onto her lap, nursing under the wheel, smoking out the window.

  “This one is driving me crazy,” she said. “She always wants to nurse. I’ve done everything to make her stop. I even put that stuff on my nipples, you know, to make them bitter. She didn’t care. She sucked on them anyway. I think she liked it.”

  “You could leave town,” I said. “You could go away. That’s what I did. I just couldn’t wean in person; it was too difficult to say no. I needed an ocean between us. It took a week.”

  “Are you kidding?” Jenna said. “And who would watch the kids? There’s no way I could go away for a week. Aden couldn’t handle it. He’s not like Simon.” She said it with a little bit of disdain, as if it was unmanly for Simon to be competent with children.

  Zac, in the back seat, grinned at something in the video. His front teeth were still missing, leaving a broad gap that made him look reptilian. My son leaned forward to watch. His eyes were glazed and his mouth was slack. They were both zombied by the screen.

  “Zac loves animals,” Jenna said. “This is one of his favourite places. You know, I took his cousin here the other week, because I wanted him to get a chance to see it. He’s lived in Jerusalem all his life, and his family has never taken him to the zoo. Some people are so lazy.”

  The zoo was the most visited tourist spot in Jerusalem. That didn’t make any sense to me, until I realized that the tourist board only counted the sites that charged admission. There were lions, elephants, a reptile house, a sculpture garden. The zoo was also one of those rare places where everyone mingled: secular Jews, Chasidim, Christians, and Muslims, monkeys, lions, and rhinos. We edged around each other as the zebra skirts the elephant, stood next to one another in line for soda and ice cream or on the viewing decks. It would have been encouraging if it weren’t so unusual. Black hats on the monkey bridge, headscarves among the parakeets, a menagerie of languages.

  We pulled in at the lot. As soon as we came in through the gate, Zac started pointing and whining at the

  concession stand, a glassed-in booth of plastic and stuffed animals, cheap binoculars, T-shirts and hats. “They always get something here,” she said. “They’re used to it. You coming in?”

  “We’ll wait,” I said. We had a rule, in our family. No gift shops. But my son looked longingly at the gaudy store window.

  Jenna flounced in, Noor on her hip, Aisha by the hand, Zac trailing behind her. They came out a few minutes later looking happier. Zac held a plastic bag of tiny animals, and Aisha and Noor both had stuffed bears cradled near their faces.

  Jenna held out another bag of animals in her manicured fingernails.

  “I didn’t want him to be the only one not to get anything.”

  “He doesn’t—” I said, but Sam grabbed the bag with a happy cry.

  “Ice cream?” she said to her children, and walked over to the counter. A woman was standing there, waiting as the man behind the counter prepared her fries. She wore a long maroon coat dress, buttoned all the way down, her hair tightly covered. Her husband and children, waiting at the picnic table, were far more casually dressed. He wore a white T-shirt and jeans faded in patches; the kids wore shorts and T-shirts. It was thirty degrees at least, but her sleeves reached her wrists, and her headscarf was black. I was hot in a T-shirt dress and sandals. It seemed unfair that she should swelter alone.

  “I used to dress like that,” Jenna said under her breath, inclining her head. Jenna was wearing a low-cut, pale yellow T-shirt with bleached jeans jewelled at the pockets, and high-heeled clogs. She wore nothing on her head. I waited for her to say more.

  “When I first came back from Louisiana. Because, you know, I wanted to try to be more religious. And I was worried about what people would say. I mean, I knew that because of my mom, and because I was from America, they would talk about me anyway, but I thought I might as well look right.”

  “Isn’t it hot? What are those made of?”

  “They can make them out of anything. Wool, silk, cotton. Mostly polyester. That one looks like polyester. It is hot. In the summer I wouldn’t wear nothing under it.”

  I laughed. The robe had brass buttons, like a military coat. It was fitted on top and swept out at the skirt. I had seen women similarly garbed in the Old City. Not a dress but a uniform, like the Chasidic girls who all wore long navy skirts, long-sleeved white blouses.

  “Why did you stop?”

  “Aden didn’t like it. He wouldn’t let me wear it. He said it wasn’t modern. He likes how I dress now. Anyway, dressed like this, I never get stopped at the checkpoints, not even once. Well, once. When my friend’s mom was with me. Wearing one of those on her head.”

  “I find it hard to imagine you dressed like that,” I said.

  But the truth was, I didn’t find it that hard to imagine, because I had once made a similar decision, though a less drastic one. When I came back from spending my first year of university in Israel I was only eighteen. Leaving felt like a failure. I went to see the rabbi who led the program and asked him what I could do to keep my faith. I don’t even know the girl who visited that rabbi anymore; she seems to have nothing to do with me, that self-important, falsely pious naïf.

  He said, “You should make a change, a physical change. Stop wearing pants and only wear skirts. That will remind you of who you are; it will serve as a promise to yourself.” Promise of what, I did not ask. Instead, I listened to him, for a year at least, the year I met Simon. What a fool.

  Jenna looked back at the woman in the maroon robe, heading to her table, a large tray stacked with snacks and drinks precariously balanced on her arms. Her husband looked at her, didn’t get up, his eyes black and flat. They studiously ignored us—our pity, our voyeurism, and our interest. We didn’t exist.

  “You know what they say,” Jenna said. “The tighter the headscarf, the worse the person. Just because someone looks religious doesn’t mean they act right. Usually, it means the opposite. Look at him. He’s not even getting up to help her.”

  Sam’s mouth was smeared with chocolate. He seemed in a stupor over his ice cream, as if he would fall asleep. Jenna wet a tissue with her water bottle and wiped his mouth. He looked up at her, mildly surprised. He was still young enough that I would wet my finger with my tongue to rub a spot off of his cheek.

  Once when we were driving with the window open a bug had become trapped in his eye and he’d screamed so loudly we almost crashed the car. We pulled over to the side of the road and I tried to look at his eye, but he was closing it so tightly that I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t pull the lid apart with my fingers. Finally I held his wet, snot-smeared face between my hands and leaned over and licked his eye, his eyelids parting with the pressure, my tongue against the hot salt of his tears and the slick rubber of the cornea. I hadn’t been prepared for the visceral grooming of parenting: the stroking, licking, nit-picking animal love.

  We walked by the murky green pond, where black swans spun slowly in lazy ovals. The swans had sinister red eyes. A group of ultra-orthodox schoolchildren sat on the grass in their black jackets, black pants, leaning on their palms, their peyos flapping weakly in the wind. “Those black hats must collect the
sunshine like a magnifying glass,” Jenna said. “God, look at them. They must be so hot.” They ate bags of Bamba—the peanut-flavoured snack that looked like Styrofoam and was so beloved by Israeli children—discarding the plastic on the green manicured grass. A few of the boys leaned over the water, throwing Bamba at the swans, calling to them in loud, raucous voices. The swans drifted over disdainfully and inclined their long necks into the water to retrieve the snacks. That was the first word for a lot of Israeli children: not “Abba,” or “Daddy,” but “Bamba.” Nobody had ever heard of peanut allergies.

  “I can’t imagine that’s good for the animals,” I said.

  Jenna said, “They don’t know how to behave.”

  On an island in the middle of the lake, a spider monkey hunched on the roof of the monkey hut, then reached out a powerful hand and swung out on the rope hung from a nearby tree, his armpit like a sail. My son reached up his arm in unconscious imitation, as if he too could fly out over the water on a rope. The schoolchildren on the grass were speaking Yiddish, though fewer and fewer did, I’d heard; even in Meah Shearim, that long linguistic resistance had begun to shift. A teacher, thin and hunched in his suit, walked over to the boys and shook a finger at the trash on the lawn. Another teacher circulated with a cardboard box of juice packets—silver pouches to puncture with a straw—made of colour and sugar and more thirst-inducing than thirst-quenching. Aisha started whining, pointing towards the box of drinks and pulling on her mother’s hand. Jenna yanked her back, harder. “It’s not for you,” she said. “You just had a drink.”

  “I have to say one thing,” Jenna said as we headed up the path towards the park in the centre of the zoo. “The Israelis, they do know how to do zoos. I mean, have you ever been to a zoo in Jordan? Pathetic.”

  At the park my son looked longingly at the swings where two Arab girls, on the very cusp of being teenagers, sat side-by-side dragging their feet along the sand. They weren’t even swinging, they were rocking, heads leaning towards each other and against the rope, hair covered in white shawls. After a few minutes I felt that bullying, parental compulsion to intervene.