The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  As I spoke with Yonatan, Ksanet, and Shambel, I noticed that their faces were softer than they were at school. It was visible how at home they felt in this place. Of course I had known there was suffering involved in navigating a foreign environment like South, but I had not known it was so deep as to be written into their features. Here, where they felt entirely accepted, they had relaxed to the extent that the habitual defensiveness was gone, and their faces were kinder-looking.

  After I visited their church, Ksanet and Yonatan greeted me more enthusiastically when I saw them at South. When I got up to leave Room 142, Yonatan called out, “Miss!”

  He dug around in the pocket of his blue jeans and handed me a large crucifix made out of silver and white enamel.

  I knew that Yonatan sold crosses to earn money, so I asked if I could pay him.

  “No,” he insisted.

  “It is a gift?”

  “Yes.”

  Then he looked perturbed. “Miss, you know Israel?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know Israel. It is the country where he is from.” And I pointed at the figure of Christ nailed to the cross.

  “Yes!” Yonatan affirmed, smiling in relief.

  I believe he was checking to make sure that I understood the meaning of the crucifix. As a newcomer, one could never tell what Americans were going to understand and what they would not understand—sometimes they did not know anything at all about matters one considered fundamental.

  * * *

  I got to know other boys from Room 142—Solomon, Methusella, Hsar Htoo, Kaee Reh, Plamedi, and Mohamed—by watching them play soccer. The first annual South High School 4 x 4 World Cup Soccer Tournament took place at the very end of the school year. Mr. Speicher recruited them all to play. He drew a map of the school to show them where to sign up for the tournament but then realized they would probably get lost, so he kindly escorted them to the right room up on the third floor. Abigail came with us. Mr. Speicher said the students should pick a name for their team.

  “Do you want to be the Congo?” he asked. “Do you want to be Mexico? Do you want to be Iraq?”

  “Brazil,” said Solomon.

  Solomon saw that the teacher had signed up Abigail to play on the same team as the boys. He and Methusella conferred in Swahili about this, then staged a protest.

  “Mister! We play with girls?” asked Methusella.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Speicher.

  “No!” cried Methusella.

  “We can’t play with a girl, Mister,” confirmed Solomon.

  “Yeah you can,” Mr. Speicher rejoined.

  “Oh!” said Solomon. Pause. “We change, we go to another team.”

  The boys were implacable. Mr. Speicher relented and found a separate team for Abigail.

  I was eager to see the boys compete, because I knew they were mad for soccer. The appointed afternoon was blazingly hot, not a cloud in the sky, and the air was parch-your-throat dry. They had roped in an additional player I did not know, a Karenni-speaking friend of Kaee Reh’s.

  Yonatan came over to watch. Then he gave me a hand-slap and a soul-shake, and said, “Miss, you hold my phone?” He left to run around the track for a while.

  Brazil (Solomon, Methusella, Plamedi, Mohamed, Kaee Reh, and Kaee Reh’s friend) was playing Luxembourg, a group of mostly white boys, several of whom I recognized from the Student Senate. The game did not go well for the newcomers. The other team had better gear—they were wearing soccer cleats, while Mohamed was scrambling around in gray plastic clogs—and also displayed greater cohesion. Brazil was riven by conflict, in part because of communication issues, and in part because of Mohamed. The younger boy had badgered the others into letting him start but then refused to come off the field. Methusella, who had stayed on the sidelines so that Mohamed could play, was fuming. Finally, Mohamed surrendered his yellow mesh jersey to Methusella, who ran onto the AstroTurf and tried to salvage the game. But Luxembourg was up, four to zero.

  Mr. Speicher swung by to check on the newcomers.

  He pointed to Mohamed’s slip-on plastic clogs. “You are playing in those?” he asked incredulously.

  Mohamed shrugged.

  “Can you run in those?”

  “Yeah!” Mohamed said enthusiastically.

  The rules dictated that each team put four players on the field, with no goalie. Solomon, Methusella, Plamedi, and Kaee Reh began to look formidable; Methusella was all lightning action, no pauses. He played a hard, street-style version of soccer. I watched him slide right in front of an opposing player, taking him down, and then saw Kaee Reh do the same. For a while, they toppled anybody who approached their goal, committing many blatant fouls. Yonatan came back to cheer for his friends, who looked like they might turn things around. Meanwhile, Mohamed was objecting to being taken out. “Miss! I only play a little bit!” he complained. Yonatan started laughing, because the young boy felt so sure he was a soccer star. Then Kaee Reh sent a slicing drive into the other team’s net. However, the newcomers had hit their stride too late. The whistle blew and Luxembourg won, five to one.

  During the lull between games, Brazil paused to regroup. They needed to win the next two games to remain in the tournament. Solomon announced, “Me and Mohamed will stay out. The rest will play.”

  Methusella looked at his older brother gratefully, and Plamedi and Kaee Reh nodded, understanding that Solomon was sacrificing himself to keep the younger boy off the field.

  Kaee Reh’s friend was oblivious of the strategy, however. He said, “Oh, okay, if you’re tired, I’ll go in.”

  “I don’t think he’s tired,” I told the Karenni-speaking boy.

  “I want the best team,” Solomon confirmed.

  “I’m good! I’m the best team!” cried Mohamed.

  But Solomon held firm, keeping both himself and the younger boy on the sidelines. Then the newcomers began to perform. Methusella scored right away, with a short punch from the center; Plamedi scored next; then Kaee Reh with a diagonal cross-shot from an almost impossible vantage. After they had established a clear lead, Kaee Reh stepped out so that Solomon could go in. Yonatan helped Mohamed get a turn, yelling to Kaee Reh’s friend to give his yellow jersey to the younger boy, and pushing the new boy onto the field, saying, “Go, Mohamed!” Surprisingly, Mohamed proceeded to score a goal, despite the plastic clogs. He threw us a big smile as Yonatan got so enthused he started doing push-ups. Then Plamedi plowed down the field to score, and Solomon and Methusella did the same. Brazil won the second game, eight to two.

  The sun had been beating down on the players for an hour and a half, and they had been in almost constant motion. I looked at their sweating bodies and flushed faces. They were dehydrating, fast. I jogged over to the far side of the AstroTurf, where a man was selling plastic bottles of water out of an ice-filled cooler, and jogged back carrying six bottles. When he saw what I was bearing, Kaee Reh bent over at the waist with both of his hands in prayer position, bowing deeply. The boys gulped down the cold water and studied the next team they were slated to play. It was a daunting-looking group of tall, well-muscled Eritreans. One of them came over to talk to me.

  “Are you Yonatan’s friend?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you their coach?” he wanted to know.

  “I am their cheerleader,” I said.

  “You won’t be cheering for them after this!” he announced and strutted away.

  I asked Yonatan if he was rooting for the newcomers or the Eritreans.

  “The Eritreans!” he admitted.

  They proved to be brutal foes. The Eritreans were bigger, older, faster, and stronger. Taking this in, Solomon and Methusella both went quiet and eagle-eyed. All of the action took place right in front of their goal. I thought Methusella had been playing rough before, but I was mistaken—that had been him being polite. He let loose during this game and it got extra-dirty, right away. The newcomers’ strategy appeared to be to commit any kind of foul to block as ma
ny goals as possible. The Eritreans complained vociferously. Methusella slid horizontally right across the path of the biggest Eritrean, with no concern for his own physical well-being, toppling the bigger player. Another Eritrean yelled, “See! That’s what I’m saying!”

  The same Eritrean called out to Mr. Speicher, “Hey, Mister! You gotta watch this game!”

  The teacher intervened and started calling the newcomers on their fouls. Mohamed was hopping up and down in his clogs on the sidelines, but nobody would turn over his jersey. “Wait, and you will play soon,” Methusella called out. He did let Mohamed play for a moment but took him out again swiftly. After Methusella blocked another goal with one of his spectacular slides, Mr. Speicher told him to stay off the ground. Then he admonished Kaee Reh for guarding his own net as a goalie would do, a violation of the rules. Despite Brazil’s efforts, the Eritreans kept scoring, and at the end of the game, Yonatan did a series of chest bumps with his victorious countrymen.

  It was a hard loss for the newcomers because they had just come together as a team, and it meant they were eliminated from the tournament. Methusella questioned Mr. Speicher about this: “But do goals count, too? Because we scored eight goals in the last game.” Mr. Speicher confirmed that they were definitely eliminated, and they trooped dejectedly over to watch the Eritreans advance into the semifinals. That team would now face Hsar Htoo and a group of Karen-speaking boys. The Karen-speaking team played hard and fast, but the Eritreans dispatched them just as handily as they had Brazil.

  In the finals, the Eritreans faced England, a team dominated by a junior named Enoch, a bowlegged superstar with a shaved head and the physique of a grown man, wearing a green Barcelona jersey. He danced across the AstroTurf like he was performing ballet. The ball rolled anywhere he wanted, and he circumvented other players with stunning ease. I was sitting beside a group of male teachers who coached various sports. Solomon sat beside me, close enough that I could smell his deodorant as he perspired, quietly studying every move that Enoch made.

  “I could coach this team—give the ball to Enoch,” joked Ben Speicher, the math teacher who oversaw the school’s wrestling team.

  “It’s Eritrea versus Enoch,” added John Walsh, the long-distance coach.

  The teachers explained that Enoch had signed up to play for a developmental team under the auspices of the Colorado Rapids soccer franchise. I passed this along to Solomon.

  “Oh!” said Solomon. “He is the best.”

  After a moment, Solomon added, “Miss, you know where he is from?”

  I turned to the teachers and asked them this question. They conferred for a while.

  “Is Enoch from Ghana?” one of the coaches asked another.

  They weren’t sure, maybe Ghana. I told this to Solomon. The foreign-born paraprofessionals who worked at South generally knew exactly what countries students came from, but the American-born teachers had a harder time remembering this information, especially if students were from Africa. There were fifty-four countries on that continent, and they tended to blur together in the minds of the Anglo staff. Later, I looked up Enoch’s background and learned that I had given Solomon incorrect information. I wrote to him on Facebook:

  Hi Solomon, it was fun to see you play soccer yesterday, and I thought you did a very good job helping your team put the right players on the field. I want to let you know that I told you the wrong information about Enoch. The teacher who told me he was from Ghana was incorrect. On the Colorado Rapids website, I saw that his nationality was listed as “Congo, DR.” So he is Congolese, actually. Have a good weekend and I will see you tomorrow.

  Solomon wrote back:

  Oh Thanks me too I was thinking that he is from Congo DRC because he looks like congolese, thanks for your information see you tomorrow.

  In other words, Solomon had been able to study the player’s features from a distance of many yards and know which country he came from. I noted that Solomon had been too polite to tell me I did not know what I was talking about when I had said maybe Ghana. Later, I would recount the story of the tournament to Mr. Williams. I told him about Solomon’s maturity and how surprising it had been to watch Hsar Htoo and Kaee Reh play soccer. I had gotten to know the boys from the Congo well enough to recognize that their behavior on the soccer field confirmed what I had sensed already—Methusella’s ferocious drive, Solomon’s basic grace. I had not spent nearly as much time with the two boys whose families were originally from Burma, however, and their personalities had remained obscured. On the AstroTurf, I had seen an entirely new side to each of them. Hsar Htoo had been gregarious and communicative while playing with other Karen speakers, and Kaee Reh had come across as fiercely energized. To see him stand with his head thrown back, his body loose and confident, his demeanor pride-filled—he never looked like that in the classroom.

  Mr. Williams nodded knowingly. He had played soccer in college and had coached a high school team. In fact, it was the unexpected pleasure he got from watching players improve under his tutelage that had led him to become a teacher. That’s why he taught, still: He loved watching kids evolve as a result of being in his care. Mr. Williams was not surprised that Hsar Htoo and Kaee Reh appeared like entirely different people out on the soccer field. “It is something they are fluent in,” the teacher observed. He knew the newcomers had hidden capacity, untapped reserves. He understood that his students might be able to say only a few hundred words today, but that did not reflect how many thousands of words they would know tomorrow.

  * * *

  Throughout the month of May Mr. Williams was working with the students on a unit about printed materials, called “I Need Some Information.” It was the final topic they would tackle that year. They covered stamps, letters, envelopes, books, newspapers, magazines, advertisements, and reference books. When he wrote a list of those items on the whiteboard, somebody asked him how to say one particular word.

  “This one here?” said Mr. Williams. “En-cy-clo-pe-di-a. En-cy-clo-pe-di-a.”

  The whole class began murmuring that word, trying it out, one syllable at a time. Then Mr. Williams asked them to write sentences about various kinds of printed materials, and went around the room checking their work. Noticing that Lisbeth was petting Mohamed again and crooning, “Is my baby!” (in English), while Mohamed wore a dreamy, faraway expression, Mr. Williams deftly suggested that Mohamed change seats and work with Hsar Htoo. When he got to Saúl, he leaned over to read out loud: “I like to read the newspaper each day because I can find a new job.” Mr. Williams nodded and said, “Yeah, that’s good.”

  Later that week, Mr. Williams took the entire class outside to look for signs, another example of printed material. The students were supposed to find signs while working in pairs. Mariam chose to work with Shani, and the two of them got so engrossed in conversation—primarily in En-glish, along with a little Farsi, a little Arabic, and a little Tajik—that they fell several hundred feet behind the rest of the group. Nadia and Ksanet went off in their own orbit, too, and so did Grace and Dilli. Meanwhile, Jakleen chose to work with Saúl, and soon I saw Saúl wearing Jakleen’s glasses. Then Saúl drew a blue ink ring on Jakleen’s ring finger, which matched the blue ink ring he had already drawn on his own left hand.

  “We are married,” Saúl told me.

  “Oh, you’ll have beautiful children,” I replied. “When did you get married?”

  “In math class.”

  Mr. Williams was fond of a young adult book by Gary Soto called Novio Boy, and lately “Novio Boy” (Lover Boy) had become his favorite nickname for Saúl.

  One day that month, Mariam took advantage of a lull in a lesson to show other girls a photograph of her dark-haired, handsome fiancé, Abdullah. Mariam announced that their wedding was going to take place over the summer. The other girls discussed the question of whether Mariam was old enough to take such a step.

  “In Iraq, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen—it’s okay to get married,” asserted Mariam.

  Na
dia looked surprised. “For me, that’s too young,” she declared.

  “Miss! Look!” Mariam said to me another day. Then she held up her phone to show me a picture of an elaborate pink gown with a tight satin bodice and a full tulle skirt.

  “Is that a wedding dress?” I asked.

  “Yes!” she said excitedly. “Mine!”

  Mariam said the wedding was going to happen in Turkey. When I mentioned the impending nuptials to Jakleen, however, she pulled an exasperated face and said, “No! Not true.” It took a while to sort out whether the wedding was on or off, but with Nabiha’s help, I ascertained that the wedding would have taken place that summer if Ebtisam could have afforded plane tickets to Turkey, but Ebtisam did not have the money. Therefore, the wedding was postponed. Mariam appeared morose about this but she accepted that the plane tickets were too costly. The idea of getting married at sixteen remained hard for me to endorse; I could see that the postponement of the marriage caused Mariam genuine pain, but I thought she would be better off if she dated a few boys and learned through trial and error what made her happy. Such a course was unimaginable to Mariam at the present time, for she viewed the idea of dating a series of men as unacceptable, but I thought she might adapt in this regard.

  Meanwhile, Jakleen’s relationship with Ghasem had been causing friction between the two sisters. While adults such as Mr. Speicher thought highly of Ghasem, Mariam considered the way her younger sister was carrying on to be inappropriate. In the middle of May, for reasons that remained unclear, Jakleen suddenly cut Ghasem out of her life. He no longer walked alongside her in the hallways and no longer came to Room 142 during lunch. Upstairs in math class, he spent an entire period holding a hand up to the side of his face, to shield his countenance from Jakleen’s view. About a week or two later, I found Jakleen eating lunch with a strapping six-foot-tall, muscular athlete. The two of them rode the same city bus to and from school. “Ghasem, very jealous!” Jakleen told me. Her expression conveyed a mix of emotions. She looked proud, concerned, guilty, and pleased, in roughly equal measure. Jakleen said the athlete was calling her habibi, which means “sweetheart” in Arabic (a word she had taught him). When I asked if she liked him, she said, “No, I don’t know, maybe, yes.”