Arabic for Beginners

by Ariela Freedman

  “He’s right,” Jenna said. “Satisfied now? Had enough?” She turned the wheel a little harder than she needed to, and Yumiko flew into me, her bony elbow in my stomach. “Are we done?”

  The bakery was empty, except for the salesmen and the rows and rows of pastries under glass cases and neon lights. The cakes were dyed lurid colours, mint green and mandarin orange, and were gleaming with oil and honey. I took a picture of Jenna in her grey V-necked T-shirt, holding a cigarette and looking off into the distance, and another of Yumiko in the very dark sunglasses.

  “Take a picture of me,” Leah said. “I need it for a dating site. I’m tired of my boyfriend. I need to find someone new.”

  “Don’t you want to fix your hair, to put on some lipstick?” Jenna said. She reached into her purse.

  “No,” Leah said. “They should see me as I am. Just, please, take the picture.” She squared her shoulders at the camera and smiled at me, her mouth closed, her eyes soft. I passed her the camera.

  “That will do,” she said, passing it back to me. “You will email it to me tonight. That’s fine.”

  I stayed away from Leah after that trip. I had still not invited her son back to my house, so the reciprocal, cyclical potlatch of play dates had been broken. And it was a shame, in a way, because her son was sweet, though I was bothered by the way that every morning he came up to me with a huge smile on his face and a toy gun in his hand and said, “Boom!” But she was exhausting.

  I still saw her dropping her son off and picking him up sometimes, her shoulders rounded, her step heavy.

  Yumiko told me about some of Leah’s other escapades: she had written a rude, aggressive email to one father in the group; she had told Jenna that her husband was “as tall as a boot and as dumb as a shoelace,” in front of her mother-in-law, no less. The women of the daycare, in a reflex of protection, had stopped bitching about their husbands in response to her constant attacks on them.

  Slowly, the other women that Leah had so forcefully befriended began to drop away from her, to make excuses when she invited their children over to play. And I began to see her less and less; she dropped her son off late, and didn’t loiter anymore at pickup, when earlier that year her booming voice was often the first I heard as I headed down the hallway to the classroom. She looked paler too, more distressed, her face shorn of the war paint that had marked it when I met her; I heard that she was having more trouble with her ex-husband and that her son cried when it was his turn to stay with his father. He told his mother he was afraid, that his father yelled, and hit him. She had been looking into a restraining order, then she had given up, and the child had stopped complaining.

  I was relieved that she had abandoned the idea of my testifying on behalf of her sanity, though I felt guilty when I saw her. And she had less and less money, and then one day her car was stolen. “By Arabs of course, who else would take such a crappy car,” she shrugged on one of the few occasions I spoke to her. Although her father replaced her car, the new one used more gas and she could not

  afford to fill the tank. Some days she stayed home with her son instead of buying the gas to get to the daycare.

  I saw her away from the daycare once, walking on the street with bags of groceries in her hands. I didn’t recognize her at first, without her son, without the car; she was muttering to herself and looked a little mad, her lipstick cracked, her mascara smeared. She saw me, and her eyes widened. For a moment it seemed she was going to say something, but then she lowered her head and plowed right past me, like someone who had somewhere important to go.

  22.

  It wasn’t until we left Jerusalem that we realized just how claustrophobic the city had sometimes been with its inescapable sun and glittering stone. On the weekends, we fled the city. The school didn’t have Sundays off but we took them off anyway; the children were young enough not to notice, and Simon only started teaching on Tuesdays. The cars we rented were tiny and battered. Back home, when you rented a car, the staff would inspect it from head to tail to testify to its shining immaculateness, but here the cars were all so dented that nobody bothered to vet them. Some young man would drive up in front of us too fast, from wherever they hid the rental cars in the dense central labyrinth of Jerusalem, after we’d been waiting so long we’d nearly given up. He would toss us the keys and vanish again, leaving us hoping that all the seat belts worked. We piled in.

  And here is the thing: we could travel. We could go anywhere we wanted, we could go places the Palestinians couldn’t go, of course, but also places the Israelis couldn’t go, our foreign passports offered us that easy access. We could spend the morning in Bethlehem and the afternoon in Jerusalem, could go out for lunch in the West Bank and have dinner in South Tel Aviv. We could go anywhere, a privilege afforded only to those who did not call the land their home.

  One day we decided to play hooky and head to the Dead Sea. On the way down, the hills were salt-white and glittering. Sam started to complain that he felt sick; we pulled over by a desolate bus stop. Next to a sign that said we were at the lowest point on earth Sam vomited into the dirt. It was hotter than Jerusalem, and the desert shimmered.

  The Dead Sea was dying, or at least, drying up. The salt in the water was becoming more concentrated, and we had seen photos of the receding shores, crusted with arabesques of salt. There was talk of piping in fresh water to keep the resorts along the shores of the Dead Sea functional. The Jordanian side, we were told, was even more beautiful, and we could see the hills of Jordan across the water, hazy and dreamlike.

  It was something I had always heard when I was a child: the Jewish pioneers made the desert bloom. It seemed like such a miraculous accomplishment, draining the swamps, banishing malaria, growing oranges and grapefruits where once there had been only sand and rock. Only, as it turned out, perhaps the desert wasn’t meant to bloom. There had been unintended consequences to the agricultural miracle, and now more than ever Israel was a country addicted to water, exporting it in the form of grapefruits, oranges, and lemons while the Galilee dried up and the Dead Sea grew ever saltier.

  Because Sunday was a workday we had expected the resort to be empty, but it was full of people. The signs were all in Russian as well as in Hebrew, and there were blond women in tiny bikinis, matrons in house dresses, and men whose stomachs pouched over their Speedos and who had caked their bodies in the medicinal mud of the Dead Sea. One sat in a white-slatted plastic beach chair, holding his cellphone gingerly away from his anointed flesh. An old woman in floral underpants and a stretched-out beige bra stood blissfully thigh deep in the water. Occasionally, she scooped up handfuls of the salty water and rubbed her soft, freckled shoulders, her large, creviced bosom. There was something fascinating and childlike about her utter lack of self-consciousness.

  The children refused to jump into the mud pit and cover their bodies in the black slime, but I did, passing an Israeli who rubbed handfuls of mud over his hairy legs and chest and then grinned at me, saying, “When you go black, you never go back!” Simon threw handfuls of mud at the children and we must have looked just like a happy family on vacation.

  But the mud burned, and then itched as it dried. The boys went into the water, but complained: it hurt and then felt icky, they said. A group of tourists were all using the same soggy newspaper as a prop for photographs. Nobody actually read it, they just held it up and looked towards the camera. There was a separate mineral pool, with a large sign extolling its therapeutic powers; I went in for a while, but it smelled strongly of sulphur, and was crowded along the edges with the heavy-lidded faces of swimmers whose resigned, long-suffering expressions announced them devoted patients of this vile, eggy therapy.

  I had forgotten, somehow, that the Dead Sea was always disappointing, as if whatever concentrated the heat and salt also served to intensify emotion so that it was a place of melancholy and tantrum. The first time I went to the Dead Sea I was thirteen. I had my period,
but went in the water anyway. I had been warned about going in with scratches on my legs, but nobody had warned me about this; the salt burned, and I was too embarrassed to tell anyone, but spent the rest of the day cross-legged and miserable on a beach chair.

  The next time we left the city, we rented a cabin on the Galilee in a small resort. The resort had an ostrich farm; the long-lashed, peg-legged creatures gazed at us haughtily from behind their fence. A sign warned that we risked getting kicked if we ventured too close. Their long sharp nails were like knives. In 1918, Theodore Roosevelt had written about how to respond if confronted by an ostrich: “If, when assailed by the ostrich, the man stands erect, he is in great danger. But by the simple expedient of lying down, he escapes all danger.” There were metal ostriches for the children to ride, ones that wouldn’t eviscerate them; we fed shekels into their necks and watched the children buck and lean. In the activity hut nearby we pasted feathers and fragments of coloured mosaic onto hollowed ostrich eggs. They were the colour of ivory, and felt thick and smooth.

  You could see the Galilee from our windows. The water was clear as glass.

  The lake was shrinking; the yards and yards of brush that stretched from our cabin had once been covered in water. We had to walk ten minutes to reach the water’s edge. We stripped down to our swimsuits in the late afternoon light, the hills around the lake stained umber and purple, the colour of the waves deepening. I was distracted, wrestling with my swimsuit under my dress; I twisted my head and realized Gabe was in the water, neck deep. I ran into the lake, fished him out, sputtering. He was calm.

  “What were you doing?” I said.

  “I just wanted to see if I could swim,” he replied.

  The wind picked up; the waves curled on the sand like fingers reaching for the old shoreline. I tried to take a picture of the boys in front of the lake, but it wasn’t right. I looked at the back of the camera and pressed the button to delete it, thinking, as I always did, that I would press the wrong button and just like that all our photographs would be gone. “Let me see that,” Simon said. He held the camera up. “Try shifting the focus point,” he said. “You were focusing on the horizon. Pick something closer. Put the focus on your subject—in this case, that’s the children. There.” I pressed down and the lens whirred and fixed. I held the camera out to look at the image. “That’s better,” he said. It was.

  On our way back to Jerusalem, we passed burning towers of garbage. The smell was black and poisonous, and coated our nostrils, the insides of our throat. Arriving in Jerusalem from the north always felt treacherous; the roads were high and narrow, and the hillsides were littered with the carcasses of tanks from the old wars, rusted and ensnared in flowers and weeds.

  But still, it was starting to feel like coming home. We were finally accustomed to the city. We had settled into our new routines, and even things that had seemed abrasive or beautiful or extraordinary had dulled for us, as if our eyes had grown calloused. My older son had sat in a classroom for three months without understanding Hebrew, and then one day the language had shifted into place for him, like an optic puzzle. He was more comfortable now, and we were more comfortable too, in our safe corral of school, daycare, coffee shop, and library, the corners of our life so sharply demarcated that even walking had become automatic. As our friends had predicted, I’d stopped reading the papers.

  And my son was in love. There was another new child in his class, a little girl. She was the youngest of seven, and her family had just moved from Britain. She was named Aliya, her very name an echo of her family’s aspirations to come to Israel. Her mother was pretty and scattered, always watching too many children, with a baby on her hip, though she looked like a college student with her long brown hair and her faded T-shirts.

  “I have something I want to tell you,” Gabe said. “But I also don’t want to tell you.”

  “What is it?” I said, and he blushed.

  “It’s about a person ...oh, never mind.”

  “A girl person?”

  He had been talking about her a lot. He said that she was crazy, but he laughed when he said it, and seemed impressed. They had a Hebrew tutor twice a week, he and Aliya and an Ethiopian girl whose mother had a faded tattoo of a cross on her forehead. I wondered what it was like, walking around Jerusalem with that enduring mark. Aliya was naughty in class, he said. But funny, she was always funny.

  “Is it Aliya?” I asked. “Do you like her?”

  “Well, of course I like her,” he said impatiently. “I like lots of people. It isn’t just that.”

  “Do you want to marry her?” I said.

  We didn’t have vocabulary for a crush yet, and asking if he loved her seemed too strong. It was a child’s game, wanting to marry; they knew about marriage, not about boyfriends and girlfriends, not yet. I was only half-listening anyway, though I knew my curiosity was pushing him farther than he’d wanted to go.

  His face cracked, and he wailed, “I didn’t want to tell you!”

  For the next two hours he stayed under the bed, curled away from us. I lay on the floor and tried to talk to him, but he told me to go away. Every so often he would wail again, and this also was new, this unfamiliar grief. It was as if these new emotions were too large for his body. It was as if he was possessed. I knew I had screwed up, and didn’t want to tell Simon, but it was clear that something

  was wrong. When he came home and I explained it to him, he looked at me, and his face flickered between amusement and disgust.

  “What is wrong with you?” he said. “Why didn’t you just leave him alone?” But he sounded satisfied when he said it; he liked being the reasonable one.

  Simon took his turn lying on the floor, trying to coax Gabriel out. As he lay beside the bed, his long legs reaching foolishly past the doorway into the hall, his voice low and soft, I felt a sudden rush of affection. He had so much patience with Gabriel, with Sam. When he got up I leaned forward and kissed his cheek, and he looked boyish suddenly, surprised and grateful.

  “What was that for?” he said, and I said, “Just because.”

  My younger son still believed that he would marry me. He liked to put his head under my shirt, so that it looked like I was pregnant. I let him; after all, he was only three. We were lying in his room like that one day, his head on my stomach while I was trying to put him to bed, and he said, “Can I just see the gate?”

  “What gate?” I said.

  “I just want to see the gate, where I came out,” he said. “Can you just let me back in the gate, just for a minute?”

  A few days later Aliya’s mother had a terrible accident. She fell off the stone balcony of her apartment; for weeks she lay motionless, her entire body encased in a cast. She had been acting out the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet for her children, or at least that was what she said, later, when she was miraculously well again. But I wondered if it wasn’t the end of the play that she had been practicing, and if she hadn’t been disappointed when she woke up in the hospital, to find that she had only been pretending and now she had to return to real life.

  When I was doing the dishes that night Simon had come up behind me and put his hands on my waist. “You smell good,” he said. “Like the sun.” The dishes had piled up all day and the sink was so full that the soapy water slopped out of the sink and down the front of my dress. He kissed my neck and then I felt the cool air on my back as his body withdrew, felt him walk away, and heard the door close.

  I turned off the tap and followed Simon into the bedroom. He was lying on the bed, his eyes closed. “What is it you want?” he said. “I’m tired of guessing. You let me know when you figure it out.”

  I sat on the bed beside him. “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, this is what I wanted. It just isn’t anything like I thought it would be.” I lay down beside him on top of the covers, my clothes on, my shoes dangling over the side of the bed, and when I took his ha
nd he did not pull away.

  “Simon,” I said. “Let’s go away, just the two of us. I’ll find something.”

  He nodded without opening his eyes. I curled onto my side and held onto him, I held on.

  23.

  While we were up north, I kept thinking about my old friend Raquel. When I was seventeen years old we had gone north together. She had thick, long honey-streaked hair, a pronounced swayback, and gappy teeth, and she was as close to sexy as anyone I had ever met, probably because she’d actually had sex. I mistook her confusion for sophistication, and she mistook my inexperience for innocence. She’d followed the Grateful Dead on tour with her boyfriend, and drew psychedelic, detailed miniatures where looping lines underwent metamorphosis into unearthly creatures. She had a strange, cracked voice that abruptly shifted registers, and spoke with an unearned world-weariness.

  Halfway through the long bus trip to Mount Hermon, we were thoroughly sick of one another. I looked out the smoked window at the furred green of the mountains—it looked like Scotland, I thought, having never been to Scotland. When we arrived, the hostel was cold and bare and empty, and a mist had settled over the small vacation town. The heat was off and the room was freezing. In the night I woke up to the smell of burning: I had draped my wet clothes on the radiator and it had coughed to life, scorching my only pants.

  But the morning was better. The mist burned off by nine o’clock, and after a spare breakfast of weak instant coffee, blue-white milk and soggy cereal, we took a walk. The streets were deserted: it felt like a place that people had fled. Beyond a knee-high wire fence was a field of flowers: daisies, narcissus, chamomile, and the silky red flag known as the humble poppy. We waded through, the sun hot on our uncovered heads, feeling drowsy and sated as bumblebees.

  But then we heard shouts from the road. Two men, red-faced, were gesturing at us, circling their arms as if to pull us in.