Arabic for Beginners

by Ariela Freedman

  “What’s the problem?” I shouted in Hebrew, feeling defensive and inconvenienced. They pointed to a sign we had walked right past. It was bright yellow and showed a stick figure flying from a cartoon blast. We picked our way back, trying to retrace our steps although the long grass hid the path, and the flowers suddenly held the menace of tiny bombs.

  “Didn’t you see?” the taller man shouted at us as we stepped back over the fence to the road. “What, do you have a death wish?”

  The top of his head was bald, and had pinked in the sun. The second man, smaller, his eyes behind mirrored sunglasses, just shook his head as if we were further evidence of the world’s stupidity. It was hard to walk back to the hostel after that, even though we were safe. I found myself testing the road nervously with the tips of my toes before laying my feet flat on the ground, as if that would have helped, as if I would have known. We had left our brief feeling of lightness back in the blooming minefield. The bus didn’t arrive until the next day: there was little to eat, nothing to do. Raquel spent the rest of the trip doodling in her journal, her Walkman firmly locked into her ears. I read Henry James and slept for fourteen hours.

  We had also visited Kfar Chabad together that year, a small town in Israel that was confusingly modeled after the neighbourhood in Brooklyn where the Lubavitch Rebbe lived. The Lubavitchers who had built the settlement believed he was the Messiah. Eight miles outside of Tel Aviv, boys scurried to Cheder in their white shirts and black coats, speaking Yiddish and looking at their feet. In the middle of the town, alien and monumental, was an exact replica of 770, the brick mansion in Crown Heights where the Rebbe made his home. The brick house was as incongruous in the landscape as the heavy black coats were in the climate.

  Somehow, though, inside the town, the architecture seemed less strange. Our eyes quickly adjusted to the way the Mediterranean sun flattened the village palate of black and white. Laundry lines hung out the windows with that same monotonous array, white shirt, black pants, white shirt, black pants, black pants, black coat, flapping in the wind like a murder of crows. The Rebbe wasn’t dead yet, and his picture was on every wall. It was always the same photograph, the one where the Rebbe is looking into the distance in three-quarter profile, the colours as tea-stained and saturated as a Rembrandt portrait. “His eyes follow you when you move,” they said, and the idea frightened me, but it wasn’t true; I tracked the picture as I walked across a room and the eyes stayed as fixed and unblinking as a taxidermied corpse, each iris pierced by a single point of light. Children were everywhere, accompanied by immaculate women with their heads wrapped and their skirts to their ankles. At dinner a draped white table laden with Sabbath food glittered in the candlelight like an apparition from a fairy tale.

  I couldn’t wait to get out of there and Raquel couldn’t stop talking about how peaceful she felt. It had made me feel the opposite of peaceful; it had made me feel enraged. Perhaps I should have known back then: this was the picture of order that she craved. All weekend, I had felt choked, like I couldn’t take a full breath. “They all seemed so happy, so at peace,” Raquel said wistfully.

  “So cloistered,” I sputtered, “so self-satisfied, so ignorant, so closed.”

  “How could you know that?” Raquel said. “Perhaps they’re just exactly where they want to be. Perhaps what you cannot stand is the fact that they are at peace, and they don’t need the rest,” her hand fluttered at her wrist, vaguely, jostling my arm, “the rest of the world.” We had both taken the visit far too personally.

  After that trip, we began spending less time together. She began travelling to the Chabad village, and to a Jerusalem hostel that took in students for Shabbat, feeding them and hosting them at long tables set with paper plates and plastic cloths. The students got cholent and sweet grape juice and a free place to stay in the Old City in exchange for listening to rabbis give long and ranting speeches. At the time, I was young enough to think that was a fair exchange.

  I did accompany her to the Old City once, and bumped into a boy whom I had met a couple of months earlier in a sleazy dance club in downtown Jerusalem. He was a film student from NYU, on exchange for the semester; he had tried to kiss me in the dark. Now he was wearing the white shirt and black pants of a Chasid; flaccid tsitsis hung out of the corners of his shirt. His parents were visiting from North America. As far as I could tell, they had come to try to convince him to return home. There were these honeytraps set up all over Israel, to catch the secular and the unaffiliated. If he stayed, he would be married within a year’s time, studying full-time at one of the yeshivot hidden behind the closed doors of the Old City; he would have many children, who would know nothing of New York or film school or dancing in the dark; he would be lost to his parents forever, dead to his old life.

  Raquel and I stayed in touch for a few years after we left Israel. We both went to college and to graduate school. She kicked up her heels at my wedding. I knew—vaguely knew—that she had become more and more involved with the Chabad branch on her campus. It was the kind of organization that offered a home to the lost souls of Judaism. At any rate, they would try to convince you that you were a lost soul.

  The last time I spoke to her I caught her on the way out the door to a date. Not a date; a shidduch. She sounded awkward and distant. Six weeks later she was married. I was not invited to the wedding.

  For a long time this vanished friendship hurt just a little bit, like a sensitive tooth when you bite down on foil. Then mostly I forgot. But when we went up north, Raquel was beside me at every turn in the road, a silent and sullen presence. After our family’s trip north, I decided to find out where she lived.

  Nobody vanishes anymore. I had expected to have difficulty locating her; I didn’t know her parents, didn’t know her married name, and didn’t even know if she was in the United States anymore. But Google found her on Facebook under her maiden name. Surely she’d changed it? And her picture on the page, the size of a postage stamp, was crowded with children but showed no man. Her hair was tightly covered under a scarf wound like a turban; she wore a long denim skirt, Keds, a T-shirt that covered her collarbones and wrists, that bland uniform of orthodoxy. It was hard to imagine all those children belonging to her. I sent a friend request, winged out into the night; when she accepted, Simon hung over my shoulder as we scrolled down her wall for clues. Four—no, five kids. No husband in any of the photographs. An old picture of her in a bikini top and cut-offs from our university years, which seemed shocking in the context of all of that heavy religious camouflage. All that year, she had been living a half hour away from us, just over the Green Line.

  And halfway down the wall was a link to an organization that helped Jewish women whose husbands would not give them divorces and a status update that seemed at once too intimate and coyly indirect: “I cannot believe a certain someone will not give me a get.” A “get,” the Jewish divorce document that was the only way to sever a halachic marriage. Indeed, the only way to sever a Jewish marriage in Israel at all.

  Oh.

  We spoke on the phone the next day, and her voice was the same as it ever had been, flushed and uneven with emotion. We didn’t speak about our shared past. Instead we spoke about the last few years. She had decided to leave her husband when she became pregnant with her last child. It was hard to describe, Raquel said—it was as if he had tried to destroy her, and she had barely survived him. Somehow the last pregnancy had given her the strength to leave. But he had not made it easy. He had accused her of cheating on him, of being an abusive mother, of not loving the children. The small neighbourhood they lived in had divided over the split; she had lost friends, lost her community. There was a restraining order against him now because the social worker had witnessed him grabbing her arm in the driveway; that was lucky, she said. But for a long time he had refused to leave the house and even now retained control of most of their assets. It had been a long battle but he had finally, possibly, agreed
to an appointment for a divorce, although he had agreed before and had failed to show up at court. She was paying him off, with money her parents had sent: she was, of course, penniless. And she had to give him custody of the three oldest children. It was strategic; he wanted it only because the yeshiva would pay him more to study if he had custody of the children, and once the divorce was in hand she would fight to reverse the custody decision.

  “Why just the three oldest children?” I said, and there was a pause at the other end of the line before her voice came back, crackling with the poor connection.

  “Because he doesn’t believe the other two are his.”

  We met in town the next day. Her hair was wrapped in a turquoise scarf, as it had been in the photograph; she noticed me looking and her hand fluttered towards her head.

  “I’ll miss this when I’m not married. I like this style of headcovering. It makes me feel like a queen.”

  We met at a cafe that I loved, hidden in a small courtyard. The walls were stone and the tables and chairs were crooked and shabby. Books lined the walls, and the placemats were printed with stories and poetry, commissioned specially by the owners. The cafe held readings, and served strong cappuccinos in exquisite ceramic cups, intensely coloured in scarlet and cerulean and saffron, and with handmade smooth uneven edges.

  More of the story emerged: her mother had flown to Israel a year earlier to try to help her. They had spent tens of thousands of dollars on a lawyer who hadn’t been able to get her the papers; now she had a legal aid lawyer, but he wasn’t much use. She had been meeting a friend in the back alleys of Geulah to receive money that her parents wired, so that her husband didn’t steal it. They had an appointment for the get; it was the next month.

  “And how strange,” she said, “that so many years after falling out of touch you should re-appear a few weeks before this finally happens. Almost bashert. Meant to be.”

  “Do you have anyone to go to court with you?” I asked, and she looked at me tentatively. “I mean, would you like me to go to court with you?”

  Raquel told me that she’d had to submit her marriage certificate as part of the paperwork for the divorce. Her rabbi had written it himself. He was the one who had first set her up with Samson. At the time of their marriage her husband was a personal indemnities lawyer. He’d donated a lot of money to the synagogue. A gantse machor—a “big man.” He had fallen into Chabad even faster than she had, although she didn’t realize it at the time; in two months his religious practice had escalated radically. He wasn’t who he’d seemed: soon after their wedding, his partner was arrested at their law firm. She was vague about the charges, but he and his partner had both lost their licenses to practice law. He’d taught at a school for a little while, and then he’d just studied in a yeshiva. He was a member of the John Birch Society; in some bastardized way he’d hoped to bring their message together with that of the Lubavitch Rebbe. For a while, they’d thought of moving to a Noahide community in Vermont. He would have been their rabbi.

  “We could have had a beautiful house,” Raquel the former architecture student said dreamily, “Queen Anne style. You know, those colourful wood shingles, stained-glass bay windows. We could have had a porch.”

  “You were going to live with members of the John Birch Society?” I said, incredulous. “Aren’t they anti-Semitic? What were you thinking?”

  “Only some of them are anti-Semitic,” she said. “Anyway, that group weren’t Birchers, they just had some similar views, you know, about the federal reserve. Anyway, it didn’t happen. But we would have had a beautiful house.”

  The rabbi who married them had been a kind of surrogate father to her: looking after her in graduate school, hosting her at his house, feeding her, picking her up from the airport, and finally, marrying her off. Marriage bound all of these new baal teshuvas, these “returnees to the faith,” to each other and the community. Each child anchored them deeper. There was a hierarchy in matchmaking: the sons of scholars married the daughters of scholars. And these baal teshuvas, of course, they married, or were married to, each other. They were part of the community now, but they would never be insiders. Their children, too, would carry that taint.

  Her neighbour took the marriage certificate into court for her. He called her that night, livid.

  “Who wrote this?” he demanded.

  She was confused. “My rabbi from home,” she said.

  “Did you give him some reason, was there some reason, what could possibly be the reason?” he asked, incoherent.

  It turned out that the rabbi had left the word betula, “virgin,” off her marriage certificate. He had branded her, and had branded her children, since it was standard practice in a shidduch, an “arranged marriage,” to submit the wedding certificate of the parents to the prospective in-laws. Her children would have to disclose her ketuba when they were later vetted by their own prospective spouses. He had labeled her a whore, and marked her family for generations.

  She had not been a virgin. But she’d never told him that.

  24.

  In December the lobby of the YMCA was taken over by the biggest Christmas tree I had ever seen, hung with glittering garlands and old-fashioned silken balls. It was always a shock to see the tree when I walked into the daycare in the morning, and then I realized that it wasn’t that the tree was large, it was that I hadn’t noticed Christmas decorations anywhere else in the city. No strings of lights, no tinsel candy canes, no Christmas carols rushing out with the warm air when you opened the door into the grocery store. I was so used to the rhythm of the calendar back home that missing Christmas was like missing snow, even though it had never been my holiday. The absence disturbed my equilibrium just a little bit. And then when I went into the lobby and saw the Christmas tree, something familiar clicked back into place, and I felt at once intruded upon and at home again.

  Chanuka and Christmas came close together that year, in the shifting two-step of the Jewish and Christian holidays, the elliptical calendar of the moon and the metronome of the sun. Gabe’s class took a field trip to the Valley of the Cross. They were learning about ecology,

  and those hills were full of olive trees. It was almost Chanuka: they would pick olives and then press them, in one of the old stone presses in the park.

  It was a perfect day. The sky was a lucid blue; the clouds were flaneurs. The children hiked up the hill, then scattered, climbing the gnarled, knobby trunks of the olive trees. They climbed like monkeys, hands and feet and nearly prehensile toes, their socks off for grip, leaving sweaters and shirts strewn on branches as the day grew warmer. It was hard to imagine a first grade class in Montreal having a field trip that included tree climbing, and one of the most alluring things about Israel was that they hadn’t yet fetishized safety, that children could just play. A few of the children, the daring ones, were already at the spindly tops, balancing on the narrow branches. We parents held white buckets for the hard green pellets and the children tossed them down.

  I had been to the Valley of the Cross a few weeks earlier. There was a monastery, a courtyard, and a small museum. The monastery had been there for nearly a thousand years, squatting at the bottom of the valley. We could see it from where we stood. The museum was random and dank and smelled of urine. There were stiff mannequins dressed in national costume, their plastic, lipsticked faces swathed in headscarves that dangled rich coins.

  A group of Russian pilgrims had come to see the church. The women wrapped shawls around their naked heads and shoulders and legs. When they stepped out into the light, you could see the shapes of their bodies through the gauzy fabric. They moved in clusters, caught in portals and on doorways as if they were not many bodies but a single body moving together, too large to gracefully navigate the narrow stone portico. They were businesslike in their devotion. Each in turn put a coin in the jar, took and lit a candle, covered her eyes for a second or two and then moved to let her ne
ighbour take her place. An assembly line of pilgrims; but in the sun outside they dissolved into individuals again, laughing and smoking and spreading out into the air.

  The courtyard was beautiful, stone and spacious and walled in bougainvillea. There were giant birdcages lining the walls, made of curlicued green-blue metal. Inside the cages tropical birds flaunted their plumage at one another, and took sudden, swooping flights from corner to corner. The Russian women pressed up against the cages, twittering at the birds. I went into the gift shop: olive-wood sculptures, olive-wood plaques, olive-wood magnets, olive-wood crosses.

  “Do the birds have something to do with the Saint?” I asked the woman behind the counter. Her eyebrows met in her forehead in a scowl. “Not at all,” she said haughtily, but gave me no further explanation. I thought of how fun it would be to take the children to see the birds, though there was something a little sad in all of their penned-up brightness.

  The teacher called us over to the olive press. “Valley of the Cross,” she kept saying, but none of the children knew what a cross was or knew what significance the place might have for the people who once named it. It was a word denuded of content; it had become just a name. The monastery below her might have been invisible. She did not mention it and nobody asked. Instead the talk was all olive trees and Maccabees and a long-ago miracle, and Eleazar piercing the belly of the elephant, and Mordechai overturning the carcass of the pig. She took a plastic bag of olives and spilled them on the press, and then one of the fathers volunteered to turn it, flexing his shoulders under his short-sleeved shirt. Donkeys once turned the olive press; the father did his best. He leaned in and the olive press wouldn’t budge; he tried again, digging in his feet and putting his shoulder to it, and backed off with an abashed smile, his eyes invisible behind the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses. “Anyone going to help me out?” he asked, and two other fathers stepped forward. Pushing together, they managed to shift the stone wheel just over the pebbled fruit. “Now, seven more times, and we will have olive oil,” the teacher said, laughing at their alarm.