Arabic for Beginners

by Ariela Freedman

  She handed out jelly donuts. There was everything to like about Chanuka, a holiday you celebrated with jelly donuts, and the city was full of them, in a kaleidoscope of colours and flavours that I had never seen. We sat in the sun, peeling the donuts off the thin napkins, our lips white with powdered sugar and our throats thick with the slightly acrid taste of the red jelly. The children finished first, and started walking along the stone wall that surrounded the press, as high as a man. Their heads cut off the sky. “Die, die,” the teacher exclaimed, which meant “enough” but always gave me pause. We carpooled back home, and in my car we had to stop so one child could spew sweet red vomit on the side of the road.

  It took me a while to wonder about the presses. Who had built them? Who had used them? Who had abandoned them to be toys for children and props for field trips in a grove of two-hundred-year-old trees that had been bearing fruit for somebody for generations?

  Sam also had an olive-picking field trip, to his teacher’s house in Beit Safafa. The trees outside Jameelah’s building were laden, and the branches low enough that the children could reach up and pick the fruit for themselves. Upstairs, in her apartment, she showed us how to crush the olives with the flat of a dull knife, to cut lemons and squeeze them over the olives, to add crushed red peppers and finally olive oil before tossing it all with our hands in a large bowl. We each took home a small jar. They had to age in our pantries for a few weeks before we could eat them. A few of the children put the raw olives in their mouths; their faces puckered from the astringency and bitterness.

  We had decided to go to Bethlehem to see the Christmas decorations and to visit a family that Simon had met a couple of weeks earlier. He’d gone on a program which brought tourists to meet Palestinian families in the West Bank, and when he came back he was invigorated. “They were so nice,” he said. “Such a lovely family. But you won’t believe how they have to live. I mean, I knew it in theory, but it’s different to see close up. You’ve got to come meet them.” “I’d love to,” I said, caught up in his excitement. This was what he’d been like when we first met; bursting with ideas and experiences that he wanted to share with me.

  Bethlehem was just south of the city, past the wall. I’d never been there, though really it was right beside Jerusalem, just on the other side of the Green Line. We took a taxi through the back streets—there was still a way to evade the checkpoint on the way in—although different taxi companies operated in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and the taxi driver charged us extra for the risk he claimed he took in bringing us over the invisible border.

  The wall hadn’t been there the last time I was in Israel: there was nothing subtle about it. Everywhere you went you came up against its brute facticity. In the distance, the wall looked like a snake, curling against the dry hills and valleys; up close, it was a behemoth, thick, impermeable, doing its best to block the sky.

  I stopped in a gift shop to buy a present for the family we were visiting. The store was full of tiny vials of myrrh and frankincense and hundreds of olive-wood carvings, blunted abstract sculptures, from the size of a thumbnail to the length of an arm. I picked up a figure of the Mother and Child and ran my finger down its lacquered smoothness.

  The owner was bored and friendly. He sat on a low stool, his knees high and akimbo. Business, he said, was slow. I asked him if he had anything for a local family, and he laughed.

  “For a local? Not here,” he said. “Go buy them a nice bottle of wine.”

  The day was overcast and dull, and the square felt empty. Small drifts of tourists crossed aimlessly. The streetlights were strung with tinsel, but on that cloudy day even the tinsel looked drab. We wandered into the church and pressed with the crowd towards the star on the floor that marked the nativity. The Church of Mary was down a side street; the gates were locked, but a group of Filipino women were pressing at the fence and calling out in high voices. Finally a monk came out, looking crabby. He handed them Ziploc bags of white liquid through the fence, and they passed him folded bills. He seemed tired and rumpled, as though he had been caught napping in a pew.

  “Mary’s milk,” Fatimah told me later. “They believe it comes from the walls. The women want to get pregnant. They think that the milk makes them fertile. These trips are pilgrimages, and the pilgrims are looking for miracles; busloads of them, mostly from the Philippines, women who can’t get pregnant.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Ignorant.”

  Fatimah el Khairi was a Christian, but not the kind that believed in miracles. She met us in the square and brought us to her apartment. She and her husband had built a small building with their family; his mother and brothers lived on the other floors. Her mother-in-law came down to lunch, dressed in a pale blue velour housecoat with small, embroidered flowers on the collar.

  We sat down at the table, spread with pita, nuts, and fruit. The apartment was large, clean, and impersonal. There were no family photographs on the wall, not much to look at except for the wide windows and a large TV in the very centre of the room.

  Fatimah was distracted. She was worried about her son; he had gone to university in Greece, and there were strikes and riots at the school. He was stranded there, waiting for classes to start, hoping not to get caught in the middle of trouble. I couldn’t imagine leaving Bethlehem only to find chaos in the place you’d gone to pursue your education in peace. He would come home for Christmas if he could, but coming home took days; you couldn’t fly directly to the West Bank. He would have to fly from Greece to Amman, maybe through Abu Dhabi. Then they would have to drive to Amman to pick him up, a drive that took fifteen hours at least because it traversed several checkpoints and took the roundabout roads the Palestinians were allowed to travel. Ben Gurion airport was less than two hours away and had direct flights to Greece every single day. But that route was no longer possible.

  Fatimah had thick dark hair and skin that looked scoured and red. By looking at her daughters you could see she had been beautiful. The girls sat on the couch watching TV. They were dressed identically in jeans and hooded sweatshirts. “Princeton,” one of the sweatshirts said. The other two said “Notre Dame” and “Columbia.” The oldest daughter would leave for school abroad the next year. There were some scholarships at American universities marked specifically for Palestinian students. But that was very far away; she lit up talking about it, then glanced at her mother, hesitated, fell quiet again. Or maybe Greece, like her brother. The only thing that was clear was that she would not stay.

  Because it was Christmas season, the family had applied for permits to visit Jerusalem. All the men were denied a permit; they had expected it. But their grandmother was also turned down. Of all the members of the family, she had wanted to go the most. She lived in Jerusalem when she was a child and her neighbour and best friend was a Jewish girl. They were blood sisters; when they were six they had cut their fingers and rubbed them together so that they were kin.

  “Why they turned me down? What can I say, I am terrorist,” the grandmother said, smiling. She said that during the last Intifada she had seen some soldiers beating a boy and she had told them to stop. They had arrested her, held her for a few hours, taken down her name and let her go. Perhaps, she speculated, that was why she’d been denied the permit. All her childhood memories lived in Jerusalem; they were so close.

  Her hair was thin and lifted like a cloud on her scalp, in the unconvincing perm of the elderly—my grandmother also had hair like that.

  The family laughed and so she repeated it again, enjoying her audience, “I must be terrorist, then!”

  She would have visited some of those old friends from her childhood, would have gone, maybe, to the church, only it was so crowded during the holiday season.

  The girls had their permits, and they were excited to go shopping, to go to the mall. The stores in Bethlehem were boring; there was nothing nice to buy.

  In the Bethlehem market there were card tables spread with photogr
aphs of bosomy singers with long full hair in heart-shaped frames. There were cable sweaters that looked like something I might have owned in 1986. There were animal carcasses on hooks, flayed and headless, sheathed in pink muscle and white fat against the turquoise of a door. The produce was more meager than the markets in Jerusalem, and the prices were higher; Fatimah stopped to weigh a cauliflower, to finger the blackened outer leaves of a giant lettuce.

  Fatimah took us for a tour of the wall, since that had become the thing to see in Bethlehem. It was obvious that she’d taken visitors on this tour before; there were highlights, familiar spots. The security wall bordered one house on three sides so that the windows looked out onto the dull concrete (not that the residents were allowed to open their shades). There was a massive trompe l’oeil of a rhinoceros blasting through the concrete, and a series of oversized black-and-white portraits of grimacing faces.

  “That has nothing to do with us,” Fatimah said dismissively. “Some foreign artist who wants to be famous. That has nothing to do with Palestinians.”

  Banksy had recently been to Bethlehem. He’d taken an expanse of the wall as his canvas. He’d also decorated the wall of a nearby building whose owner then sold it to a gallery in London: it was carted off, brick by brick, and the wall rebuilt. The owner of that wall made hundreds of thousands of dollars, the rumour said.

  A restaurateur had written out his menu in giant painted letters, using the wall as his billboard. “Seafood,” it said. “Denise. Crouper. Mullet. Beef Fillet. Desert.” I remembered the rule: two “s”s in “dessert,” because you want it to last longer; one “s” in “desert,” because you are eager to escape.

  Aside from the celebrity graffiti, there was lots of ordinary tagging, smaller-scale and somehow more touching: “Ghetto Pimp” in block letters, and slogans of solidarity, “Minnesota with Palestine” and “Berlin with Palestine” and “Detroit with Palestine” and “Boise, Idaho with Palestine.” Most of the tags were Arabic or English, but one tag in Hebrew said, “milhama lo hummus,” “war is not hummus.” Nearby, in childish handwriting, was a plaintive phrase, written by an unsteady hand at about chest height: “Can I have my ball back please?” In the car Fatimah’s children seemed bored and restless and I felt sorry for them, sacrificing their Sunday for us.

  At the checkpoint we lined up along a long, fenced corridor; it felt like a pathway for livestock, as though we were lambs being led to slaughter. It wasn’t a hot day, but the tin ceiling of the walkway seemed to concentrate and focus the heat as we moved slowly towards the booth. We took off our belts, our shoes, and our bags. The guards yelled at an old woman in Hebrew, telling her to take off her shoes. She had no idea what they were asking. “What are you, an idiot?” the guard said roughly. Simon took my hand.

  At the security booth, the soldiers sat behind plexiglass barriers. A family of three waited ahead of us. While the guard looked down to check the father’s handprint, the father’s tongue flickered in and out so quickly that I wasn’t sure I had even seen it; when she looked back up at him his face was still but his eyes were laughing. I remembered a friend who had told me that checkpoint was the worst duty; the most dreadful combination of boredom and threat. It took all afternoon to shake off the misery of the place.

  When the El Khairis came to Jerusalem to visit us on their visas the next week, one of the daughters was

  missing.

  “She didn’t want to go through the checkpoint,” her sister, Mouna, said.

  Mouna, too, was furious. When Mouna had passed through the checkpoint, the metal detector had kept beeping, and the guard had forced her to take off her shoes, her belt, her hair clip.

  “And they were watching me, and laughing,” Mouna cried. “All those men, watching me undress!”

  25.

  Although the children were getting older, the demands of childcare still felt incessant, especially when anything went wrong—an illness, a sudden deadline, an unexpected day off school. I missed my children when I wasn’t home, but being home often made me claustrophobic. It was as if I’d lost the ability to be fully with them or fully alone. At home I was often distracted, and my distraction was a kind of lazy rebellion, an attempt to carve out a private space in my head. And then, when I was on my own for too long, I felt suddenly, wildly, lonely.

  One day I walked down to the Old City to take a break from looking after Sam, who had been battling a virus. I’d been inside with him for three days. The climb up to Jaffa Gate was hot and tiring after the cool, long descent through the shadowed alleys of Yemin Moshe. The gate was crowded with juice sellers, tour guides, beggars, merchants, and always tourists. Locals who had walked through the gate a thousand times or more strode past as if it was any busy urban intersection. Visitors craned their necks like animals readied for sacrifice in order to decipher the inscriptions on the gate and to pose for photographs, which was a frustrating experience because someone was always walking through the picture on their way to an errand or appointment.

  In Arabic, the gate was called Bab-el-Halil. Suleiman had built the gate in the sixteenth century; the entrance was enlarged at the end of the nineteenth century for Kaiser Wilhelm II so he could remain in his imperial carriage as he entered the Old City. When General Allenby came in 1917, he swung off his horse and walked in on foot to show respect for the Holy City. Now the gate was an ingress for a lazy, snub-nosed fleet of black-and-yellow taxis that pulled into parking spots just inside like a herd of stabled donkeys.

  You descended into the market on broad stone steps, and even on the hottest days when the sun burned the street white, the alley was striped in blue shade. It was crowded from ten in the morning to around sundown, and all kinds of people passed through. Yeshiva boys rushed three or four abreast, peyos and tsitsis and elbows all flying. There were painted carts being bumped up and down the steps, boys with silver trays filled with glass cups of hot tea, women in veils and headscarves or niqabs and women in short shorts, children on their way to class, soldiers on their way to guard duty. There were trays of dried rose petals, saffron, sumac, bowls of irregular, cracked brilliant turquoise, teardrop pendants of amber encasing splayed and immobilized insects, rosaries in cedar, sculptures of the Virgin in stone, Jesus on black velvet.

  A shuffling man with a three-day beard and pouches under his eyes sold me a scarf, then told me I was naive to think that the Americans hadn’t planned the attacks of September 11th or that Netanyahu hadn’t poisoned Arafat in his Ramallah mansion. “You don’t have to believe me,” he shrugged, folding his scarves for display, striped and floral and cotton and silk. “But then you are a fool.”

  “Why would you think that?” I said.

  Glancing at me, he said, “Why are you asking me questions, anyway? Are you a spy?”

  There were spies all over the market, he said. There were spies everywhere. He offered to sell me a scarf. I reminded him that I had just bought a scarf and he shrugged his shoulders, sighed heavily, and turned his back. He had no more use for me.

  Deeper in the market was a merchant who wore an enormous belt buckle with his jeans and had a “Don’t Mess with Texas” plaque over his shop. Inside, framed pictures of Clinton showed the two of them posing against his bricolage of carpets and mirrors.

  “Did you see Rahmy, baby?” he said.

  Rahm Emmanuel had come through the market that morning, flanked by security, posing for pictures and buying souvenirs. The merchant now had a new photograph for his wall; he showed it to me on the back of his camera. The two of them had identical toothy smiles.

  A staircase at the end of his alley led up to the rooftops of the Old City. I walked up and the babble of the market receded behind me as if someone had shut a door. The rooftops fit together like puzzle pieces. They were crowded places, with shacks built on the flat surfaces, old bicycles leaning against doorways, laundry unfurling like sails, and through a lattice of television antennas the bright
yellow cap on the Dome of the Rock. A barbed wire fence enclosed a playground and a row of Israeli flags; that was the Jewish settlement built in the Arab quarter. I had seen some of its residents earlier, vanishing behind a heavy door. The women wore long sweeping skirts and twisted their headscarves like turbans, and the men had long beards, long hair, and kippas the size of soup plates. I’d noticed them because the men all wore Uzis strapped across their hips, though none of them had uniforms. The women had an elegant, stiff-necked haughtiness and swept through the market as if none of it existed, in a bright, rigid bubble of their own righteousness.

  “But why shouldn’t they live anywhere they want to in Jerusalem?” a friend of mine had asked, and even while trying to explain myself I felt the empty hopelessness that always accompanied conversations about Israeli politics, the dazzle and abyss of complication that so quickly festered into insult and attack, that felt like pouring glitter into an open wound.

  And all along the street, every storefront was a snare. I could see confused couples attempting to extricate themselves from the promise of just one cup of tea, trying to reconcile their politeness, their curiosity, and their greed with their sense of privacy and their desire to move through the streets unencumbered. I was practiced at dodging and deferring and smiling at a distance, but sometimes I was also caught by even the most obvious displays of pathos.

  On my way home that day a merchant convinced me to come into his store down the street by claiming he was very sick, his wife was sick, he needed to make one last sale before going to the hospital. I followed him into his shuttered shop, which was further than he’d claimed, and stood both empty and unlit. Each time I thought about turning back to the main road he held my arm at the elbow, steering me inside, not exactly forcefully but with insistence. He babbled on about his health, his wife, his family, and then suddenly he was making plans for me to open an outlet for his jewelry in Canada, to set up a website for him—“Canadians,” he said dramatically, opening up the dog-eared black-covered book of testimonials that every merchant kept like a bible, “they love my work.” On the blue-lined page, Anne from Toronto, Ontario, rhapsodized about her lovely new scarf.