Arabic for Beginners

by Ariela Freedman

  “No,” I said. “No. I can’t open a business.”

  He looked at me in profound disappointment and disgust.

  “I can see that you have no head for business or you would not miss this wonderful opportunity,” he said. “But at least you will buy something or else you have wasted my time.”

  “Your time!” I angrily started, but he had moved away. A long glass case held necklaces, and he opened the case and took them out, watching me watch the

  jewelry—“Ah—this one I see you do not like—but this one you like, this one is my own design.” The necklace he chose was made of Roman glass, and the silver chain—if it was silver—was oxidized, so it didn’t have the arrogant gleam of the others. The piece of glass itself, small and modest, had the glint of mosaic but was also less glittery and elaborate.

  “I have to go,” I said, “my son is sick, I have to go home.” I suddenly felt trapped, as if I might never make it back to Sam and Gabe.

  He looked at me again and said, “I see all your thoughts are with your son, and look, now you are crying.”

  And it was true. My eyes had started tearing as I spoke, as if saying it out loud—my son is sick—had brought back the anxiety of the last few days. He’d been running a fever, was strangely listless; it was just a virus but he had been sleeping badly, and I had been waking up with him. I was weary and felt unsettled.

  The clerk put the necklace down and his fat moist hands reached for my forehead. With two thumbs he stroked my eyebrows, from the centre to the hollows on the side of my head. He then rested his thumbs in the hollows and rotated them. I didn’t know what to do.

  “I know how to do this because my sister is a therapist,” he announced. “Your husband should do this for you when you are home.” He stood back and rolled up his sleeve. “The truth is,” he said, “I am also very sick. I was just in the hospital, for my kidney—they gave me two injections—look, here.” In the crook of his elbow were two bruised holes, like the twin fangs of a serpent bite.

  “And even, it is hurting me now,” he said, reaching his hands behind his thick waist.

  “You should go home and rest,” I said.

  “I will. I am. I was going home. But you see, I cannot go home with no money.”

  He opened his wallet and showed me, but shut it again quickly, because there was money in there, more than I carried on me.

  “Do you know how many sales I made today?” he said to me. “One. Only one! So tell me if you want to buy this necklace and make your mother happy. I will give you a very good deal, since you are not buying it for yourself—a lady never buys jewelry for herself.”

  I had in my bag a pendant I’d bought for myself earlier that day. The man’s eyes bulged, and the whites were the thick, curdled creamy yellow of pudding. It seemed that he was at once looking at me and looking at the door, my only way out. I wanted to protest that it was my time, my time that had been wasted, that he had drawn me by the elbow like a child into this deserted store. I should have known better than to follow him, and how far away was the street and would anyone hear me if I cried out? But he was rolling up his sleeve and showing me the puncture wounds again and the bruising all the way up his arms and telling me about the hospital procedures that involved—could I be remembering this correctly?—removing his blood and replacing it, so I picked out a necklace from a dusty case and he spread out his fingers and held it out to me, and then insisted on putting it around my neck.

  His cold, thick fingers fumbled as he closed the clasp, and I could see his face behind mine in the mirror, but his eyes were somewhere else. I handed him a hundred-shekel bill—he asked for more, but accepted it—and I stumbled back out of the musty, dark shop into the glare and noise of Jaffa Street, discomfited, unraped. I didn’t even look at the necklace properly until I was a few blocks away, when I stopped and leaned against the wall and took it off my neck. The setting was antiqued silver and the pendant was Roman glass, that blued, lacquered opalescence that time had crafted like a pearl around the grit in an oyster. The Old City was full of Roman glass, real and fake, and I assumed that this too was fraudulent. But a year later it was still opaque and glimmering while the larger Roman glass pendant I had bought from a seller I knew and trusted, who I visited and drank tea and practiced Arabic with almost every time I went to the market, had proved to be a fake, the sheen peeling off with wear like foil off a gimcrack ring to reveal the plain new glass underneath.

  I was late coming home, and Simon was angry.

  “I need to get to work,” he said. “Sam was asking for you. It took two hours to get him to take a nap. He’s sick, you know.”

  “Of course I know,” I said, “I’ve been home with him all week. Anyway, this strange thing happened to me in the Old City. It’s kind of a funny thing….”

  I started to explain the story to Simon but he was gathering his papers and putting on his jacket, and his mouth twisted as he turned back to face me. “What did you think you were doing?” he said. “You can’t just pretend that you’re going to be protected by your—stupidity. You have to stop walking around as if you’re untouchable, as if nothing could possibly happen to you. What would you have done if he hadn’t let you leave? I don’t know where your head is these days. You’re acting like a child, and you have to stop.”

  “Or what?” I said. My throat filled with salt.

  He shrugged. “Or—I don’t know. I don’t know where you are these days, but one thing’s for sure, even when you’re here you aren’t here. He’s awake—” Simon said, gesturing towards the closed bedroom door. “I have to go.”

  I went to the osteopath the day after that trip to the Old City and he noticed that my shoes were uneven. He said one leg was longer than the other, and that I was dragging one foot. He suggested I switch my shoes. I dreamed that instead of walking heavily on one leg and dragging the other, I was walking with only one leg and the other was treading on the air. Even in the dream, it was very difficult, and as I walked on air I could feel the strain.

  It made me think of this Hebrew phrase I’d recently learned, “maka yevesha,” which in English would mean something like “a dry bruise.” It refers to a blow that is deeply painful but leaves no mark, under the armpit, for instance. The kind of blow you feel but do not see. It is the kind of punch that is used in secret interrogations.

  PART 3

  26.

  Right after Christmas the war began. I woke up to a friend’s one-line Facebook status: “My country breaks my heart.”

  Many years earlier, when I was in college in Israel in the tense days leading up to the Gulf War, my parents told me to come home. I was seventeen, and I thought of defying them. I had damp visions of heroism and courage, mostly formed by my vague memories of First World War memoirs. What was it that Freud said when the First World War started—“All my libido is dedicated to Austria-Hungary”? I was up all night in a friend’s room, drunk on the excitement. When I came back to my room there were ten messages on my desk telling me to call my parents—back then there was no email, there were no cellphones. They said I had to come home, and I nearly hung up on them. My mother was crying. I asked the administrator at the college if I could stay at the school, and he said that they were closing the dormitories. Everyone was going home but I had no home in Israel. I had missed the gas mask distribution; the stores were out of tape for the windows. I called my parents back and took a

  midnight flight from a chaotic airport that was the closest I’ve ever been to an evacuation. I was envious of the friends who stayed. My plane left the day before the Scuds started falling. When I stepped out of the plane into the unfamiliar cold of a sudden winter, jet-lagged and ragged, I thought my heart had frozen.

  I spent most of the war in my basement in front of the television. I’d watch the news with my father, chest tight as the rockets fell. They were hard to see; just small, bright red dots on the screen,
like the tip of my father’s cigarette, which flared up as he inhaled. In the week between the commencement of the war and my return he’d started smoking again; that was on my conscience.

  This time I would not leave. Life in wartime was just like peacetime in Jerusalem. I dropped my sons off at school, sat in a coffee shop in the weak January sunshine, tried to get some work done, did some grocery shopping, and kept stubbornly hanging my clothes outside despite the technical arrival of winter. We got worried emails from our families back in the States, and sent back calm, unruffled responses. The weather was unaffected by the conflict in the south of the country. I remembered meeting an Australian girl in India, years earlier, who had just been surfing in Sri Lanka during the darkest days of the civil war. “But isn’t there a war?” I’d asked her. “Isn’t it unsafe?” In her nasal drawl she said, “The waaah’s in the south, and the saaa-rfing’s in the north.”

  Everyone everywhere seemed entirely immersed in the everyday. It was as if we had collectively agreed not to talk about it, without ever having spoken at all.

  Jenna held Zac’s fourth birthday party at her house. Most of the families from the daycare were already there when I arrived, hanging out on the terrace. The tables in the living room were covered with food, and the children sat on the couch in front of bowls of chips and candy and two-litre bottles of soda. They’d started loading as much food as they could onto plastic plates, as if it was a famine year and their very last chance to eat.

  Jenna’s mother-in-law wandered in, brushing the table with her broad hips. Jenna said her mother-in-law had been absolutely useless planning the party. She’d had demands: they needed to serve this kind of cake and this kind of meat, needed to invite this many of her friends. She was nervous, perhaps rightly so, about Jenna’s friends coming into the neighbourhood and making her look bad. But she hadn’t offered to watch the kids, to pick up food, or to cook. She looked at us suspiciously and then smiled widely, gold teeth glinting. I couldn’t quite get over the distance between her and her tall, thin, modern son. Had she made him that way, to live in a world that she couldn’t inhabit? Or did he feel like a stranger to her in his pressed jeans, his Ray-Bans, his polo shirts?

  The children were shuttled out onto the large concrete terrace so that Jenna could straighten up the room and bring out the cake. I was nervous about the pit next door. The wall that separated the properties was hip high, seductively jumpable. The children milled in the centre of the terrace and the adults leaned against the wall.

  Katie’s husband, Roger, was home on leave from Iraq, where he’d been transferred after leaving the Jerusalem consulate. I was curious about him; he’d been away most of the year, and we’d never met. Katie told me that since he’d come back, he seemed to spend all his time in the shower and in bed. He roused himself for a few hours to play with the boys, then lapsed into wordlessness as soon as she went to bed, channel surfing until long after Katie had gone to sleep. Sometimes he slept on the couch but even when he came to bed they slept on opposite sides, back to back, curled away from each other. Once or twice he’d woken up shouting, but he didn’t want to talk about his dreams, didn’t want to talk about Iraq, didn’t want to talk at all except about the general details of housekeeping or parenting: who was dropping the boys off, who was picking the boys up, what they would eat for dinner. And neither of them wanted to talk about that, not really, but it needed to happen.

  As the shadows grew long and the air cooled down, Roger told me about living in Iraq.

  “If this war triggers a war with Iran,” he said, “just get out. Don’t wait to see what’s happening, don’t assume they’re not a threat. It isn’t a risk that you should take.”

  I wanted to ask him more, but he was distracted and tight-lipped, looking far away. I wanted to know what he knew. We’d been out on the terrace for a long time. Sam had a helium balloon and was dragging it along the sky like a pet on a leash. I wanted to leave, but it was rude to leave before the cake, and we still weren’t being allowed inside. Jenna was having some kind of debate with her mother-in-law near the door, her arms flying, and then her mother-in-law produced an enormous key ring and unlocked it. We all pressed in to ooh and aaah at the cake.

  Later, Jenna said, “Do you know what she did? She locked us out! While I was on the terrace. She was mad at me from before, so she locked us out of the party, and refused to let us back in!”

  “Mad at you for what?” I said, but she shrugged her narrow shoulders and raised her hands, open-palmed, as if it was beyond her power to say, as if it was always everything and nothing at all.

  Jenna was full of wild rumours about the war. She said that Israel had poisoned the water supply in Gaza City; she said they’d put something in it to make the men impotent. I said that couldn’t possibly be true. It seemed, if anything, much milder than the truth; over a million people trapped between the desert and the sea, and the bombs falling day and night. I couldn’t talk to Jenna because she was full of insane urban myths, and I couldn’t talk to my Israeli neighbours because they felt their position to be unassailable; after all, my neighbours insisted, Hamas had been shooting rockets at Israel for three years. And we—that furtive, usurping “we”—we had no choice.

  The war was always on television, a constant, hysterical stream of coverage. Simon and I tried not to turn it on too often. There was a sentimental documentary piece about a centre for the disabled near Sderot. They didn’t have a bomb shelter that was handicapped-accessible. There was nowhere for the residents to go if a Katyusha rocket fell on the building. The camera held long lingering shots on wasted limbs, hands clutching the armrests of wheelchairs, sympathetic faces. The children of Sderot had nowhere to play; the residents were trying to build a playground in a bomb shelter, in case the children needed to spend a lot of time underground.

  But a bomb had not fallen on the centre. The war would end three weeks later, the casualties a hundred in Gaza to every single Israeli.

  It wasn’t as if there was a lack of suffering in Sderot; it wasn’t as though I doubted the nightmares, the strained nerves, the frightened children, the fear while living under siege. But the absences in the Israeli news were most striking: the flattened buildings of Gaza City, the children without water, the hundreds—soon over a thousand—Palestinians dead. The radical unevenness of force.

  “Don’t you think they’d do the same if they had the weapons?” Shayna argued when I broached the subject. “Don’t you think they would be worse? What kind of country allows another country to aim rockets at their civilians again and again? What are we supposed to do, wait for their aim to improve? What choice have they given us?”

  I was reminded of a man I had once met, an aggrieved professor who considered himself perpetually wronged. “If you hit me,” he said, “I will CRUSH you,” stretching a thin smile over grey teeth.

  As the war dragged on, the daycare became strangely dull and silent. I could see the wear and worry on the teachers’ faces. Jameelah and Sarah had worked together for fifteen years and once again had something they could not talk about. The silence at the daycare was a tacit pact; let us not disturb the fragile equilibrium we have found together. But the war was more than an elephant in the room, it was like a raging fire in the building, sucking the oxygen out of casual, everyday interactions. The children didn’t notice, but the parents looked at one another suspiciously and hurried more at drop-off and pick-up.

  One day a siren sounded and Leah started screaming, “It’s the Katyushas! It’s beginning here! They are trying to kill us all!” The siren—it was a car alarm—subsided, and we were left in the silent classroom, us and them, when weeks before we had just been parents and teachers and children, worried about toilet training and our children eating vegetables and how to fill the long hours between pick-up at the daycare and dinner.

  While sipping tea in Jenna’s living room, Leah told her that the war in Gaza was justified be
cause Palestinian life was worth less than Israeli life. Again she repeated that strange formulation she had used to me. “If it is my child, or one of theirs, I choose my child.”

  It was a hypothetical question, like the one about the sinking ship, when you have to save the baby or the Mona Lisa. Who asked her to choose?

  Provoked, Jenna said, “Then I hope the IDF bombs my house right now, where your kid is playing.” At that moment the radio announced that rockets had begun to fall on the north of Israel and Jenna raised her eyes to the ceiling and cried, “God has heard my prayer!”

  Jenna said that because of the war, the women in Gaza had become more fertile, a pregnancy for every casualty. She called it a miracle.

  My friends were fighting a war on Facebook. One had dedicated her status to a Katyusha count, while another was tracking the casualties in Gaza. We received a mass email from Fatimah in Bethlehem with atrocity photographs of children that could have been from any conflict. There were rumours in the paper of a new weapon, a kind of bomb that left a whitish residue and made limbs vanish, like a witch’s curse, leaving a sealed stump behind.

  In Gabriel’s school, some of the fathers were called up to fight. They came to drop off their children while dressed in uniform and then drove directly from the school to their army bases. A psychologist came to talk to the first grade. He asked them to draw a picture of war. My son drew a flying creature in shades of phoenix orange and red, half-dragon half-bird, a small figure carrying a large sword standing on its back. In his scratchy beginner’s handwriting he etched the Hebrew word “milchama,” “war,” along the top of the page. In his picture, the figures all seemed so happy—the dragon flew along with a smile stretched across his face, the figure standing on the dragon’s back was grinning broadly. He had no idea, and I was glad, though I overheard other children his age casually talking about the war. Being a stranger had protected him from that knowledge.