“Trust me,” the cabbie said again, grimly.
People were always telling me to trust them, but nobody trusted anyone else.
But despite this current of hostility, we were also often overwhelmed with kindness. We had more dinner invitations than we could accept. People called the house, offered casseroles, cookies, favours. A stranger at the bus stop clucked her tongue at my open coat and gave me a shawl out of her bag. Old women wiped my sons’ noses, commented on their bare hands, their dirty shirts, their summer sandals, told me to have more children, to buy better shoes, to make sure they wear a hat, to always carry a tissue.
Hebrew in the street still sounded like birdsong to me, faraway and incomprehensible, but the gears were starting to shift back in my mind so sometimes I was actually listening, not just translating. Still, I did not feel at home. I missed autumn leaves, the smell of woodsmoke, brick houses, and cold cheeks. I kept having bad dreams.
I tried to talk to Simon about the dreams, but I couldn’t, because they would have become ammunition in his new campaign to bring us home. “It was a mistake to come here,” he kept saying grimly, and each time he said it, I felt the walls close in around us. He came home from work looking stooped, his body a tall thin question mark. He’d launch into news about his day as I stood there with my hands full of nothing. “I’m disappointed with my colleagues,” he’d say. “It’s all nepotism here, everybody is somebody’s nephew or cousin, there is no real chance for collaboration.” Or, “I can’t see why they want me at their departmental meetings, it’s an utter waste of my time, if they were interested in my feedback that would be one thing, but they talk right over me.”
So I turned into a tap-dancing, finger-snapping parody of positivity, which was my default role when faced with sadness. “Look at how beautiful these morning glories are!” I would say, or, “Can you believe, it’s snowing and freezing back home and look at these gorgeous blue skies!” I couldn’t help myself, couldn’t help putting on the exaggerated clownish mask, the grotesquely happy face. Under the bluster, it was as if I was really whispering, “Couldn’t you just try to be happy?” Besides, I would have given almost anything to change places with him, to go to the university in the morning, to have colleagues and conversations with adults about something, anything other than children.
There were city elections that fall, and the city was papered with posters, rolling by on the sides of city buses, covering the old stone walls, littering the streets. Three main candidates were running for mayor: One was an ultra-orthodox rabbi whose publicity posters drew him as a smiling, bearded cartoon—a Jewish Santa Claus, more than one journalist had commented. There was a Russian billionaire with thick and clotted Hebrew, wanted in France for smuggling arms to the civil war in Angola. He looked so sinister on the posters on the sides of bus shelters that my sons had taken to calling him “the super villain.” Then there was a slick, millionaire businessman, three-quarter profile in his posters and steely-eyed, wearing
a conservative black suit and a blue tie.
Everyone was terrified that the Santa Claus rebbe—his name was Porush—would win, and that he would turn the city into an ultra-orthodox fortress. He had been caught on tape saying, “In ten years, all of the cities of Israel will be ours.”
“We are losing our city,” a friend said hysterically; she was canvassing at night for a fringe candidate, and she was convinced he would do well because everyone she knew was voting for him. But that was only our friends.
The Jerusalem Arabs usually boycotted the election, and the Russian billionaire was the only candidate who bothered meeting with them; for most voters, this only increased his apparent villainy.
Nir Barkat was the clear front-runner. We were invited to a film premiere one Saturday night, and on the way to the theatre, we kept passing posters of his sleek and smarmy face.
Simon said, “God, I’m sick of him. I don’t need to ever see his face again.” No sooner had we walked into the theatre than Simon nudged me and said, “Look.” There was Barkat, in the flesh, looking smooth and handsome, barely more dimensional than his posters, with a military straightness to his back.
We kept rubbernecking until the introductions to the movie started. A dowager minced down the aisle, dressed in a fluted and architectural white coat, like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. The seats were reserved with the names of the luminaries of Israeli politics, past and present.
Many of them sat empty.
Natan Sharansky was there, his lips like two greying pieces of meat. I remembered the Cold War rallies back in the eighties, when Sharansky was imprisoned. How many times had I stood outside in the cold and chanted with a small crowd: “Da, Da, Aliya, Nyet, Nyet Soviet!” In solitary confinement, Sharansky played chess against himself in his head. He dreamed of a place he’d never seen. Now here he was, fat and prosperous, glad-handing down the aisles, kissing women on the cheek. He introduced the film and made a show of adjusting the mike “for short people.”
But his introduction was interrupted; a plump woman was walking down the aisle, flexing her rosebud mouth in an approximation of an apologetic smile, fluttering wide painted eyes under a stiff carapace of hair. She walked like a pigeon, all bustle and chest and backside, and everyone turned away from Sharansky and watched her.
It must have been a bitter pill to swallow, after surviving prison and solitary confinement, to lose his audience to a former flight attendant with a reputation for abusing the help, and who had happened to marry a man who was once Prime Minister. When her housekeeper had complained about being mistreated, the Prime Minister’s wife had said, “But I am the mother of the nation! You should feel honoured to work for the Netanyahu family.”
Sharansky recovered quickly. “Sara,” he boomed, his voice much larger than his body, “how good that you could make it.” She flapped her hand at him like a bird with a broken wing.
9.
Though we’d gone halfway around the world, it seemed like everyone we met was North American. Our neighbours Deborah and David were from Boston. They invited us to their house for the holiday of Sukkot. We entered the house through a small courtyard, climbed uneven steps, and stepped into a great room with cathedral ceilings and heavy wood beams that seemed more Swiss than Israeli. Set for twenty, the table groaned.
The fabric walls of their sukka were covered with a stylized mural of the Old City of Jerusalem. It took a minute to figure out what was missing; the domes and steeples of the mosques and churches were gone. “How nice to see Jerusalem without the mosques and churches. Just our own,” one of the guests said, and everyone laughed.
“Those are Ottoman walls. Jews didn’t build those walls,” I said, and he said, “You don’t have to take it so seriously.”
But this was a common fantasy; Jerusalem pictured without the ubiquitous golden cap of the Dome of the Rock, or the slate fish scales of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I’d seen the pattern in kitschy paintings sold in the alleys of the Old City, printed in silhouette on ceramic platters and household blessings and other tacky Judaica for sale by the basketful all over Jerusalem so that Jewish households in Pittsburgh or Chicago could take this little piece of Jerusalem back with them. Our city, not theirs. Even the way that locals referred to the golden dome as the “kippa”—even that claimed it. One day Gabriel came back from school saying, “Israel is the centre of the world and Jerusalem is the centre of Israel and the Western Wall is the centre of Jerusalem.” I was reminded of those gorgeous old medieval maps, the world as a woman and Jerusalem at its navel. But I also sat down with him and with a globe. I pointed to the small lopsided carrot of the country and said, “Does this look like the centre?”
At the Sukkot dinner party, my children played with toys from the baskets kept in the living room, while a cornucopia of dishes appeared from the kitchen: broiled eggplant with a sauce of tahini and sun-dried tomatoes, lasagna because the children woul
d eat it, spreads from the best place in the souk, fish because Deborah was promised it was fresh, a salad of fennel and apples to stimulate the appetite, Jerusalem artichokes because she hadn’t made them for a long time, a mushroom pie that she just was trying out, asparagus since it was in season, squash because it was hard to get. I knew two of the faces around the table—an old acquaintance from ten years back and her handsome, feckless husband. The children whispered tense negotiations over toy figurines and Lego structures. The bottle of wine we had brought sat on a side table, crowded by four or five other better bottles.
I was sitting next to a rabbi named Zev. He told me that his synagogue had done a special program for children that week. “We visited a children’s hospital ward in East Jerusalem,” he said. “We dressed up as clowns, you know, to communicate with them. Lots of those kids can’t even speak Hebrew.”
“What about communicating with them in Arabic?” I said. “Instead of dressing up like clowns. Aren’t the kids supposed to learn Arabic in school here?”
He looked down at his plate, and made a show of cutting his eggplant. Shelley piped in from across the table. “I wouldn’t bother with them,” she said. “They don’t appreciate it. Trust me.”
I knew Shelley from New York. She was the daughter of a judge. She had steadily become more observant, and now drew her hair under a tight beret that left her face looking feline and pointed. She was talking about the last time she had given birth, though it was hard to hear her across the table. “You don’t know what they’re like,” she said. “There was an Arab woman in the room with me at the hospital. The Arab doctors had completely screwed up her delivery, and she’d had to be transferred to Ein Kerem. She kept complaining because she’d been held up at the checkpoint, she said she almost died. But really, it’s her own people that almost killed her. I told her, if you guys didn’t smuggle bombs in ambulances you wouldn’t be held up. It’s your own fault. It’s that simple, really.” Her eyes shone in the light of the holiday candles. Her baby lay asleep in her stroller behind her, sweetly plump, oblivious.
“She almost died?” I said. “And they wouldn’t let her through?”
“Look, we treat them, in our hospitals. They would never do that for us. I’d rather she be held up at the checkpoint, and my children be free to play in the streets of Jerusalem. They have no right to complain. If they suffer, it’s their own fault.”
“But she had just given birth.”
“I feel no sympathy for them,” Shelley said. “They don’t deserve our sympathy.”
“You don’t understand what it’s like here,” Zev chimed in. “They dance in the streets when we die, you have to remember that. Remember the Gulf War? Dancing on the roofs when the rockets came. They’re savages.”
“They,” I said, “who is they? How can you say that every single Palestinian is responsible ...?” I broke off, feeling flushed and furious. The room was hot and someone kept refilling my glass of wine.
Zev said, with an air of concession, “Yes, it’s too bad that the good ones have to suffer because of the actions of their countrymen.”
Shelley said, “When I lived in the West Bank during the last Intifada, if my car had broken down, I would have had to get out and hide until the soldiers came, or they would have lynched me. My children and me. Every time I drove that road I was frightened.”
At the head of the table our benevolent, gnomic host smiled sweetly. “It’s the Arab mentality,” he said, “to kill. What is it? I mean it must be something in their religion.”
On the table, old dishes were whisked away and new dishes continued to appear: three kinds of ice cream, two kinds of cake, a massive platter of fruit, and five kinds of cheese on a sacrificial wooden cutting board. In the distance someone was singing.
“Dessert!” Deborah said, sounding the closing chime on the conversation. “Look at all this cheese. I can’t trust you at the market anymore, David,” and then to us, fondly, “he must have spent two hundred shekels on cheese.”
“Guilty as charged,” David said, and the table dissolved into requests for lemon sorbet or coffee ice cream, to pass the cake and pour the wine, and people asking, “What kind of cheese is this one? It’s delicious!” Amidst the choreography of exchanged platters and reaching hands, I noticed Deborah looking at me, quick and worried, trying to protect everyone at once.
I got up to go to the washroom. I sat there for a long time, looking at the wall, trying to calm down. I had forgotten so much about this country. When I came out, Simon was hovering near the door.
“Are you all right?” he said in a low voice. “You need to remember that it’s complicated, very complicated here. People are frightened. They mean well.”
He put his arm on my shoulder and I could feel my throat constrict, because it had been a long time since I’d felt like he was looking after me. I leaned into the softness of his neck. He smelled like home.
“It’s alright,” I said, “I think I’m going to be fine.”
There was a dispute around the toy basket; I slipped back down to the floor next to my boys, lost myself in Lego battles until it was time to go.
10.
After that dinner, I decided I needed to do—to do, god, I didn’t know what. Anything. My old friend Elah from graduate school had moved to Israel to work on her dissertation, but had gradually been drawn into activism. She always seemed busy with meetings and demonstrations though it was unclear exactly what she did. She had been asking me to come to Bi’ilin so I could see for myself, and though I’d been in Israel for two months, I hadn’t yet managed to join her.
Elah attended a protest in Bi’ilin every Friday. The security wall had separated the Palestinian farmers of Bi’ilin from their olive groves; the Supreme Court had ruled in their favour a few years earlier and ordered for the wall to be moved. But the wall was still in place, grey and implacable, and every Friday a motley group of protestors walked towards it until the soldiers stopped them. The group of demonstrators was pretty diverse; local Palestinians, Israeli Arabs, and Jews on the left, as well as journalists, tourists, and activists who rotated through protests as if they were visiting museums or national parks.
People were routinely arrested; the year before, a man had been killed when he was hit by a rubber bullet at close range. I had a friend who had served his miluim, his annual month of reserve duty, at that stretch of the wall. “It’s choreographed,” he shrugged. “Everyone knows exactly what will happen.” It reminded me of Kafka’s parable, “Leopards in the Temple,” in which the leopards break into the temple and drink the wine of sacrament until that, too, becomes a part of the ritual.
A man named Micah drove us to Bi’ilin. He was grey haired and slim hipped, with pale eyes, and he said he’d been an activist for forty years. I wore a T-shirt and a knee-length skirt—in the car, it had hiked up to my thigh. Elah’s friend Shira, also in the back seat, looked at my legs disapprovingly.
“Didn’t you tell her how to dress, Elah?”
I pulled the skirt down.
“She’s fine,” Elah called back from the front seat. “You’ll see when she gets out of the car. It isn’t short.”
“It looks short to me,” Shira said.
Shira was in her thirties, buxom, cat-eyed, with pillowy, pouting lips. She wore wide cotton trousers, and a scarf over her hair. “It’s for you that I’m worried,” she said. “Because the first time I went, I dressed like that, and the women of the village, they pulled me aside and told me it was not appropriate. They don’t have any of these freedoms, you know—we shouldn’t be flaunting it in front of them. It’s difficult enough for them already.”
“Don’t give her a hard time,” Elah said, “she’s fine. Anyway, I have a scarf.”
“It’s for your sake,” Shira repeated, “because I felt so awful about it.” I looked out the window.
Elah had been traveling to Hebr
on on the weekends. The Jewish settlers in Hebron were known to be among the most extreme; they assaulted farmers who were working their own land, goat herders with their flocks, shepherds on the hills. Elah was part of a group that tried to stand witness, but her presence didn’t always protect them, and she had been spat on, called names, even hit. “It makes me understand the Bible better, actually,” she said. “The sheep, the pastoral landscape, the stranger. It makes me feel very Jewish.” She had been called a heretic and a traitor, but mostly they just called her a slut.
In fifteen minutes, we had passed into the West Bank and back out of it—through part of the patchwork that makes up Israeli territory around Jerusalem. We’d passed two checkpoints without slowing down, and then a settlement, clean tall apartment buildings and new roads and two women in long skirts and headscarves waiting at a bus stop. Now we were in the hills, winding up a country road. A biblical landscape: olive trees, rocky hills.
“I never come from this direction,” Micah said, frowning and reversing. “I think this is right.” The town was pretty, with low white houses and flowering gardens. A skeleton of a house was rising, or rising again, near the road where we entered the town; some boys were balanced on the scaffolding, and looked like they should be playing with blocks, not buildings. “Good for them,”
Micah said, as he honked and waved.
“Rebuilding already?” Elah said. “How long ago did that house get knocked down?”
“A couple of weeks, I think,” Micah said, pulling up in front of a little store.
Elah went in to buy a soda and I wandered over to the crowd. There was a group of German tourists, perhaps thirty of them. A few tanned, dreadlocked men with serious cameras and video equipment were laughing and smoking. Kids from the town wore white T-shirts and bad denim, and milled around old-school punks with green hair and safety-pinned ears and noses.
Before we left Jerusalem, Elah had emailed me, “I promise you will not get arrested.” She had brought me a scarf, for the tear gas. She’d said, “In the worst-case scenario, they will use skunk. It smells terrible but it will not hurt you. It’s meant to shame you, actually. You must not panic when the gas comes. That is the worst thing you can do. You need to cover your mouth and breathe slowly, otherwise you will not be able to breathe at all and you might feel quite sick.” We walked slowly, near the back of the line.
Arabic for Beginners Page 5
