The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  3

  * * *

  Smile

  My early conversations with Jakleen and Mariam took place at their school. The girls agreed to have lunch one day with me and an Arabic-speaking interpreter named Nabiha, a stylish woman in her midfifties who was also from Iraq. At our initial meeting, my only goal was to explain to the girls who I was and what I was doing at South in a language they could understand. As Nabiha and I walked to the classroom, she mentioned that she was a former refugee herself. When the bell rang for lunch, we climbed up four flights of stairs with Jakleen and Mariam to the crowded cafeteria and chatted with the girls while they stood in line for food. With Nabiha’s help, I told Jakleen and Mariam that Nabiha’s daughters had lived through something like what they were going through right now.

  “Her children had to learn English here,” I said. “And they would come home crying! They would say, ‘We are so smart, and the classes are so basic.’ ”

  “Yeah, it’s true,” Mariam said, through Nabiha. “That is what it is like.”

  The girls carried their trays of food back downstairs to Room 142, where they customarily ate lunch. We sat down with them and I explained with Nabiha’s help that I wanted to tell them why I was visiting their classroom. Earlier, I had tried to convey with hand signs that I was a writer, but I had no idea what if anything had come across. “Mr. Williams has agreed I can write a book about him and his class,” I said to the girls. “I hope to write about some of the students who volunteer to tell their stories. Some of the students have said, ‘Yes, I want to talk to you.’ Some have said, ‘No, thank you.’ ”

  “It’s okay to talk,” said Mariam.

  I gave the girls a letter for their mother, written in Arabic, and said we would speak further if she agreed it was okay.

  “I’m sure my mom, she will say okay,” Mariam assured me.

  It was interesting to see that once I had an interpreter in the room, Mariam tended to speak for both girls. Previously I had mistaken her for having a softer personality, and had imagined that Jakleen would be more outspoken.

  When we met again, during another lunch period, the girls explained that although they were from Iraq originally, most of their schooling had taken place in Syria. In essence, they were double refugees—first they had been displaced by the Iraq War, and then they were displaced again by the civil war in Syria. It was while they were living in Syria that their father had gone missing.

  “My dad got lost,” Mariam told me. “When we were in Syria, it was very expensive, we didn’t have any money.”

  “Everything got expensive—like oil, we couldn’t buy oil for heat, for the winter,” Jakleen added. “We didn’t have any way to heat the apartment, we just had to cover ourselves with a blanket. And the food also, it was very expensive. We had to eat just a potato or just an eggplant. And nothing else. And the rent on the apartment got expensive.”

  “So my dad said, ‘I’m going to go back to Iraq to work,’ ” Mariam elaborated. “After that, he was gone. We didn’t see him again. We don’t know where he went.”

  I asked what they remembered about their early years in Iraq, before their father had gone missing. The girls had been only five and six years old when the family had left Baghdad, however, and their understanding of events from that time was jumbled, vague.

  “They threatened my dad,” Jakleen said.

  “Who threatened him?” I asked.

  “We don’t know,” she said. “The terrorists.”

  “We remember just a tiny bit about Iraq,” Mariam added. “Not a lot.”

  “He was working with the Americans,” Jakleen said.

  * * *

  We agreed that I should hear the rest of their story after I met with their mother. Jakleen and Mariam lived in Pine Creek Apartments, a low-rent housing complex in far southeast Denver. On my first visit, I strayed off course among the dozen or so identical buildings, and wandered around in the dark for a long time. All of the utilitarian structures appeared indistinguishable, one white stucco building after another; eventually I saw that the buildings were individually numbered, but the girls had given me only a street address. Nabiha had come to the meeting, too, but she was lost in a different part of the apartment complex. I kept calling her, she kept calling me, and we both kept calling the family; the phone calls only led to greater confusion and we spent more than thirty minutes trying to sort things out. If we had all been able to speak the same language, it would have been a five-minute complication, but the language barrier magnified every blip in communication. I could see that this was simply what it was going to be like, trying to get to know individuals from a culture so different than mine. There would be a lot of fumbling around in the dark before any potential illumination.

  We found one another only after Jakleen and her mother, Ebtisam, came outside to search for me. I recognized Jakleen across one of the complex’s large open areas by the familiar silhouette of her hijab, which she wore in the traditional Iraqi manner. She pinned up her long hair, pulled on a cotton headband along her hairline, and then wrapped a large wool scarf around her face. Ebtisam did not wear a hijab. She was a pretty woman with short brown hair, a heart-shaped face, mauve lipstick, and eyebrows carefully stenciled into arches. Her attire was Western, a close-fitting orange T-shirt and tight blue jeans. When we found each other at last, Ebtisam hugged me. We had never met before, but she was a demonstrative woman, and we had been looking for each other for a while.

  I was carrying a box of Middle Eastern pastries from a restaurant called Jerusalem because I wanted to share something that would taste like home. I was nervous about the meeting, given the increasingly hostile atmosphere toward Muslims in the United States, and I wanted the girls’ mother to feel comfortable sharing her version of the family’s story. Ebtisam and Jakleen showed me the way to their apartment, on the ground floor of Building #1. We walked down an endless hallway illuminated with fluorescent lights. The textured walls were painted a shiny bright white and indoor-outdoor carpeting gave the place an institutional feel. Mariam opened the door to the family’s home. The apartment had two bedrooms, a galley kitchen, and a generous-sized living room, filled with the characterless furniture of a doctor’s office: an oak coffee table, two oversized green sofas, beige carpeting. They had not chosen the furniture; it had been donated by their resettlement agency. The walls were bare, but Ebtisam had tried to add a splash of life by arranging orange and yellow artificial lilies in a white china vase.

  Mariam was wearing chunky headphones, the kind that covered her ears entirely. I put my hands over my own ears to mimic them. “Is it good music?” I asked. “No! No music,” she said. She had been watching an Arabic-language TV program on her cell phone. Mariam was especially fond of an Egyptian talk show called Al Hokm (The Verdict) hosted by Wafaa Al Kilani, the Barbara Walters of the Middle East. The girls also watched a lot of Arabic-language news reports on YouTube about Iraqi and Syrian refugees, avidly devouring news clips about people who shared their circumstances.

  In anticipation of our visit, Ebtisam and her daughters had spent the afternoon baking cookies filled with dates and walnuts. They had also arranged apple slices and orange segments in fan shapes on a large plate. Between what I had brought and what they had made, we had quite a spread. The girls carried trays of food to the low coffee table and we all sat down in the living room. Mariam ducked into the small kitchen to make coffee, as Jakleen sat down on a sofa with her legs tucked under her. She had on skinny-legged blue jeans and a T-shirt. When she unwound her gray scarf, I was surprised to see that her hair was now auburn.

  “I like the color of your hair,” I said, as Nabiha translated for me. “Is it new?”

  “Yes,” Jakleen said.

  “I didn’t know, because I haven’t seen your hair for weeks,” I told her.

  Jakleen smiled politely—a stay-off-my-turf kind of smile. I did not ask why she wore the hijab when her sister and her mother left their hair uncovered be
cause I could see it would be a sensitive subject. I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable on my first visit to her home.

  Mariam came into the room bearing tiny red cups of thick, spiced coffee. As she handed us the little cups, I said thank you and Nabiha said shukraan.

  “Oh! Arabic coffee!” said Nabiha in English.

  “It’s actually Turkish coffee,” Mariam corrected in Arabic.

  Entire essays have been written on the distinction between Arabic coffee and Turkish coffee; the coffee Mariam served us was extra-strong and velvety, and in it I tasted cardamom. Nabiha and I ate the oranges and the apples and the cookies while Ebtisam and her daughters ate the baklava. They exclaimed over the familiar treats I had brought. We had been welcomed warmly and I believed we were ready to start talking, so I was dismayed when Nabiha announced she had to leave shortly. She explained first in English and then in Arabic that she had allotted only one hour for our conversation, and we had used up more than half the time trying to find one another outside in the dark. I had hoped this evening might yield answers to questions about what this family had lived through while their country had been at war with mine, and about what it was like to be Muslim and arrive in the United States at this juncture, when political candidates were debating the wisdom of accepting refugees, sometimes in inflammatory terms. I had also been wondering what had happened to Jakleen and Mariam’s father. My questions were going to have to wait, however, because Nabiha could stay for only twenty more minutes. Trying to bridge two cultures would be slow, awkward, and convoluted, at least at the beginning, apparently. I squelched my frustration, telling myself that I had to learn to manage a relationship with an interpreter even as I was forging a connection with Ebtisam.

  In the same moment, I decided that I liked Nabiha a lot, and it seemed as though Ebtisam did, too. Nabiha’s face relaxed into a look of total absorption whenever she listened to someone speak, and she was highly responsive when anybody said something moving. Her manner was kind and unreserved, and she put all of us at ease.

  As we were drinking Mariam’s spiced coffee, Nabiha explained to Ebtisam that she had arrived in the United States as a refugee herself in 1997, from a part of Kurdistan that fell in northern Iraq.

  “My daughters told me, ‘Mom, you have ruined our lives!’ ” Nabiha recounted in English and then in Arabic. “They hated it here at first. They said, ‘We don’t understand English, this place is terrible, we want to go home!’ ”

  Her daughters were saying the same sort of things, Ebtisam told us. Nabiha assured her that this was only a phase. It would pass.

  “Now, one of my daughters, she is a pediatric dentist, and another daughter, she is studying medicine, to become a psychiatrist,” Nabiha said proudly. “And my son, he is an engineer.”

  Nabiha showed us pictures of her children on her cell phone.

  Nabiha had spoken Kurdish at home and had studied Arabic at school. She learned English only after arriving in the United States, by taking classes at a local technical college. Throughout the conversation, there were times when she had to pause and search for the right word in English, and sometimes her English sentences were not completely grammatical. I wondered how much would be lost in translation. As I listened to her comfort Ebtisam, however, I saw how quickly the interpreter was able to build kinship. Ebtisam seemed starved for reassurance about the choices she had made, and it mattered a lot that Nabiha had shared a similar journey.

  As we spoke, Mariam and Jakleen half listened and half played with their phones. They were writing messages on Facebook to friends in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Germany, and were simultaneously listening to Arabic-language songs or watching Arabic-language videos. Their phones transported them back to the familiar world of the Middle East, allowing them to escape the strange English-speaking environment that surrounded them here. Jakleen and Mariam were sitting on the sofa with their legs intertwined, and it was clear they were especially close. When their little sister Lulu emerged from one of the bedrooms and joined us, she seemed left out, but she handled this with goofy aplomb, clowning around with her mother. Where did the girls go when they were not at school? I asked at one point. They were here, they said. They just stayed in the apartment. I could imagine that huddling on the sofa together felt a lot safer than braving the bus system, where Jakleen’s hijab drew taunts and stares.

  Ebtisam bought the phones for her daughters after they had gotten lost a few times. Once Jakleen and Mariam had tried to go home from school by a different route than usual, catching a bus that stopped right beside the main parking lot at South, but instead of transferring to a second bus correctly, they rode the first bus all the way to the end of the line. There were hardly any people in the vast echoing bus terminus where they disembarked. They tried speaking to one young man who looked to be roughly their own age, but after Mariam pantomimed making a phone call, he seemed to think that she wanted his phone number, which he happily provided, to Mariam’s mortification. Then they found a kindhearted older woman, and this time while Mariam pantomimed holding a phone to her ear, she also said, “Mum Mum!” The woman let them use her phone and even stayed with them until Ebtisam figured out how to find them.

  Their initial experiences in the United States had made the girls nostalgic for Turkey. They had learned Turkish quickly and had done well in school there, they said. By contrast, they felt confounded by English, and the difficulties they were having understanding their teachers at South made them feel stupid.

  “I think you are very bright and you will learn English quickly,” I told them.

  “I don’t think so!” Jakleen replied in Arabic. “We are not acquiring a lot of English yet.”

  “It must be hard to be enrolled in Mr. Williams’s class, where the sentences that you are making are so basic,” I said.

  “Yes, I was laughing at myself,” Jakleen replied. “I was saying, ‘This is for kids.’ ”

  At that point, Nabiha had to leave, but we arranged to meet again. While we were looking at our calendars, Ebtisam grew anxious; she had been forgetting appointments, she confessed. Recently, she had lost her cell phone while she was riding on a bus, which meant she had lost her calendar, her contacts, and all of the photographs she had possessed. The loss of the phone nagged at her. Ebtisam fretted when Nabiha gave her a business card—everybody wanted to give her their cards, and she kept losing those, too. What did American people do with all the cards they collected? I could see that Ebtisam might be fragile. She had mustered all of the determination she possessed to transport her family here, but since then she had been under enormous stress. She was finding English hard to acquire, and she was struggling to figure out how to support the entire family by herself in a place that was more expensive than anywhere else she had ever lived. Due to her lack of English, she had difficulty making friends. There were some Arabic-speaking men who lived at Pine Creek, but they leered at her daughters and spoke disrespectfully to Ebtisam. As a single parent, she had no partner with whom to discuss all of the challenges she faced. Ebtisam had welcomed us into her home with aplomb, but obviously she was going through an enormous struggle, and I sensed that she was lonely. Ebtisam looked as disappointed as I felt when Nabiha said that we had to cut our conversation short.

  As we were leaving, I asked how to spell Ebtisam’s name. Nabiha wasn’t sure how to do that in the Latin script, and Ebtisam helped us figure this out.

  “Smile,” Ebtisam said to me in English.

  “Your name means ‘smile’?” I asked, to clarify.

  “Yes, that’s right,” she confirmed through Nabiha.

  When she was little, I imagined that Ebtisam’s name must have felt like a blessing. Now it seemed more like an exhortation: Smile, for the sake of your children. Smile, even when you might rather weep. Which she had done, I thought, that very evening. I was impressed by Ebtisam; she had a lot of grit. Rapprochement was taking place at a much slower pace than I was accustomed to, however, due to our need to use an i
nterpreter. The obstacles between us were bigger than any I’d surmounted previously, and I had no idea whether I was going to succeed in actually getting to know this woman. But I wanted to, because I could sense the scale of what Ebtisam had lived through, and I liked her style. I left feeling stymied at the brevity of our first conversation but optimistic about the chance of more meaningful encounters because of the warm manner in which we had been received and because of the extent to which Nabiha and Ebtisam had bonded.

  4

  * * *

  Do You Want a Pencil?

  The third major unit in the newcomer curriculum was called “My School Day,” and it consisted of descriptions of time. Mr. Williams’s students had trouble remembering the English names for the days of the week, so he wrote a song about that subject. He knew the song was juvenile, but he figured the kids might be entertained to hear him sing it anyway.

  Which he did—to the tune of the French nursery rhyme “Frère Jacques.”

  Monday, Tuesday,

  Wednesday, Thursday,

  Fri-i-day, Fri-i-day.

  These are all school days.

  We have school on these days.

  Yes we do. Yes we do.

  Saturday, Sunday.

  Here is the weekend!

  I can rest. I can play!

  I can’t wait for Monday.

  It’s the most fun day!

  Back to school, school is cool!

  The performance broke up the monotony, anyway. As the days sped by, almost as fast as in the song, the mornings started off with a bite in the air, then all of the trees in the city started turning bright yellow. Closer to sea level, fall shows off its glory in bloodred and blazing orange, but Colorado has an abundance of aspens and cottonwoods, and fall manifests as buttery gold.

  In the middle of October, a few weeks after the big clump of new students showed up at South, a therapist from Jewish Family Service named Pauline Ng walked into Room 142. “Miss Pauline,” as the students called her, was an Asian-American woman with a calm demeanor and short black hair. She wore a black T-shirt, a knee-length brown skirt, and black clogs. Since many of the students had lived through traumatic experiences, Mr. Williams and his team at South believed they might benefit from participating in group therapy, which Jewish Family Service was providing at no cost to the school district. Miss Pauline typically took half of the newcomers away for what she called “group,” then brought those students back and borrowed the other half.