Arabic for Beginners

by Ariela Freedman

  “Hello,” I said, “shalom?”

  “Hannah,” Jenna said, and her voice was urgent, “I need to bring the children over, something’s wrong with Aden.”

  “Of course,” I said, “is everything alright?”

  “I’ll explain when I get there,” Jenna said. “He’s at the hospital waiting for tests, I got to go. Of course his mother, stupid cow, can’t be found just when I need her. She’s probably going to think it’s my fault anyway.”

  “What’s your fault?” I said, but Jenna had hung up.

  She must have been calling from the road because the buzzer sounded five minutes later. She hauled the children up the stairs, the little one on her hip. Noor kept reaching over with her skinny hand to slap Jenna on the face, and Jenna kept catching her hand before she made contact.

  “She’s mad at me,” Jenna said. “She wanted to stay in the car and watch her show—here, I brought it. Look, Noor, you can watch it here.”

  Noor toddled over to the television and stood right in front of it, her ruffled skirt the exact breadth of the screen, her hands in fists on her hips.

  “Hey!” Sam said, and Jenna reached forward, swept Noor off the floor and onto the couch. Sam sat back.

  “I hope I won’t be long,” Jenna said, “I’ll call you. He started having these awful stomach pains, like an appendix or something. I brought the bottles and the pacifier, that’s right here, and some snacks ‘cause I didn’t know if you had the food they like, thanks, I’ll call you, I got to go.”

  “All right,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Anyone

  hungry?”

  I looked at the cover of the DVD. Jenna had brought me Robocop.

  “I don’t want to watch this baby show,” Zac said, glaring at the screen, “I want to watch my movie.”

  “It’s broken,” I said, hoping he didn’t know how to check, and he looked at me as if he didn’t believe me but settled on the couch anyway, his skinny arms crossed in front of his chest. Jenna had brought a bagful of chips and candy, food I never had in the house. The children pounced on it.

  After Tom and Jerry the kids watched a Japanese cartoon dubbed into Hebrew that Zac seemed to recognize. As he watched, he laughed, his mouth open wide, his toothless gums shining. I hadn’t ever seen him laugh at the daycare. Simon came home and sat on the couch, sandwiched between the children, so we were two adults and five children, all of us waiting for Jenna.

  Then there was a knock on the door.

  “That must be her,” I said, but when I opened the door it was my neighbour. She was squat and short and had blond hair so stiff, so permed and bleached, that it stood out around her head like a wig. Come to think of it, it may have been a wig.

  “You have some children over!” Daphna said. “How nice! Are they from the school?”

  “Yes,” I said. I could sense that she was trying to look around me, into the apartment, but my shoulders blocked her view.

  “That’s good!” she said. “It’s good for the children to have friends!”

  She had a son, too, a dark, sullen boy with a pre-adolescent hint of moustache whose shirts were always a little tight. I had never seen him with any friends. I stood there, waiting.

  “Right,” she said. “So the mashkanta is due at the end of the month.”

  I wasn’t sure how the most unpleasant person in the co-op ended up being the one to collect the housing payment, or why she wanted the position, since I often heard her complaining about it. Simon said it was because she liked to spy on everybody. As I turned to get the checkbook, I could feel her small eyes on my back, could feel her desire to be asked inside almost as a physical pressure. I grabbed the checkbook, and came back to the door.

  “What nice children!” she said again. “What are their names?”

  She had never asked the names of my own children.

  I pretended not to hear her. “See you later Daphna,”

  I said heartily, and though I didn’t quite shut the door in her face I came close.

  “What was that about?” I said.

  “Shhh,” Gabe said. He was enraptured by the television. Usually we turned it off after half an hour.

  Three Pokémon episodes, two snacks, and half a tantrum later the phone rang.

  Simon held the phone tightly to his ear. “Uh huh. Ok. That’s good,” he said, and put the phone down. “She’s on her way,” Simon said. “Everything is fine. But she wants the kids to be ready, because Aden is in the car, and they’re both pretty tired.”

  When Jenna came upstairs, she looked exhausted. “Men are such babies,” she said. “He kept yelling that he was dying. Anyway, they couldn’t find anything wrong with him. Good thing we’re the ones who have the children, right? They could never handle the pain.”

  When the house was quiet again and the children were in bed I turned to Simon. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his face lit by the spectral glow of the computer.

  “What do you think Daphna wanted?” I said.

  He shrugged, his face tight. He hated Daphna.

  “What does she always want?” he said. “To be a pain in the ass.”

  “Do you think she was trying to figure out who they were?” I said. “If they were Arabs?”

  “I thought of that,” he said. “But who cares. It’s none of her business. Anyway, it’ll make her happy, give her something to gossip about.”

  For some reason, when I was lying in bed that night, I remembered something that had happened years earlier. When Simon and I first moved in together, we were living in the East Village. We had a tiny third-floor apartment. It was a hot August day, the air thick and heavy. I was walking home when a girl approached me. She had blue hair, a safety pin in her ear. Back then there were always punk kids hanging out on our street. She was standing with a friend whose head was half-shaved, half-bleached and spiked.

  “Excuse me,” she said, and her voice was nothing like her appearance. It was soft and well-bred, like the girl who sits at the front of the classroom, not the girl who sits on the sidewalk on St. Mark’s Place.

  “Yes,” I said, caught by surprise. I was never hard enough for New York.

  “Do you have a tampon?” she said. “Or a couple of tampons?” Under the pale blue hair, her face was miserable. She had light freckles, I remember, sprinkled across her nose and cheekbones. Sam has the same kind of freckles.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t.” But suddenly I had an idea. “I live right here,” I said. “In this building. If you want to come up, I have some tampons, and you can use the bathroom. Also, I’ve got ice cream if you want some.”

  “Ice cream!” she said, and for a moment I could hear the kid she had been. I suppose she still was a kid, and I was too, barely twenty-one and living with someone for the first time.

  “Come on, Deb,” she said, and her friend shrugged, and followed her up the stairs to my apartment. But

  somehow, everything felt wrong. As we climbed the stairs, the air grew heavier and hotter, and when we arrived at the door Simon was running the electric saw, working on the bed he had decided to build us in order to save space in the tiny apartment.

  The saw was loud, and the air was full of sawdust.

  “What the hell is that?” Deb said, and my face grew hot.

  “God, I’m really sorry,” I said, “I didn’t know he’d be working on it, that’s my boyfriend. He’s building us a bed.”

  “That’s so cute!” the blue-haired girl said. She hadn’t told me her name. “This place is really cute! You live here together?”

  Deb cut her eyes at me and then said to her friend, “Why don’t you get the tampons, we should go.”

  “But the ice cream!” the blue-haired girl said, and Deb sighed and followed me to our tiny kitchen. Our freezer was full of frost, and the ice cream had half-melted; Simon kept the saw runnin
g in the next room so it sounded a little like we were standing on an airport runway.

  The blue-haired girl disappeared into the bathroom and I stood leaning against the fridge, awkwardly, as Deb smashed her ice cream with a spoon, leaving most of it in the bowl.

  “You’re bleeding,” she said, and I said, “What?”

  She pointed at my hand. I’d cut myself cooking a couple of days earlier, and somehow I must have pulled off the scab. My whole hand looked bloody, though it was just a scratch, and as I ran it under the sink the blue-haired girl came out of the bathroom and said, “Your bathroom is so nice!”

  “We have to go,” Deb said. “Thanks a lot for the ice cream.” She said it flatly, and without inflection.

  “You guys are so nice,” the blue-haired girl said sadly, but they were already out the door.

  Later that day, our neighbour Pete accosted me. “You can’t do that,” he said. He was a real New Yorker, born and bred in Stuyvesant Town.

  “What?” I said. “They were just girls.”

  “They’re not just girls,” he said, “don’t be naive. This is New York, you can’t just let these people into your house. You don’t know what they’re like. You can’t do that again.”

  Later on I realized that Deb’s stiffness had not been unfriendliness but fear. She was inside a strange apartment, with a man running an electric saw and a woman whose hand was bleeding. It must have been terrifying. It was a day before I thought to check the medicine in the bathroom, but as far as I could tell nothing had been taken, except for the Advil that the blue-haired girl had requested on her way out. A month later we left Pete our keys and instructions to water our plants; we came back to find our plants dead and our whiskey bottle empty.

  The night after the girls came over Simon finished our bed. There was a rough ladder and a platform, enough room to sit up on the bed but not to kneel.

  “Wow,” I said, hollowly.

  “Come on,” he said, boyish and excited, “let’s try it!”

  I climbed up the ladder carefully. My legs were shaking. It felt five degrees hotter in the bed. Simon climbed up and lay beside me, and the room grew hotter still. The ceiling seemed too close, as if it was pressing down on me; I was nauseous and short of breath. He put his hand on my hip and I lay there, still and sullen.

  “I don’t think I can sleep here,” I said. “It’s so hot.”

  His hand twitched back, off my hip.

  “I’m sorry,” I said miserably. “Maybe when it’s cooler. I’m really sorry. I’ll sleep on the couch tonight.”

  He said nothing, and I climbed over him as he lay there in silence. I slept on the couch that night and I slept badly, with the window open and the night sounds of the New York street in my living room. In the morning, Simon looked exhausted and wasn’t speaking to me. But in the afternoon, when I got back from school, the apartment was full of sawdust and the bed on truncated legs on the floor. A pile of lumber was leaning near the front door, and Simon himself was nowhere to be found.

  21.

  Being a mother puts you into contact with all kinds of people you never would have known; it makes you part of a world of shared identity and responsibilities. It’s like having a passport to another country, one you barely knew existed, though it’s hardly glamorous, filled as it is with domestic cares and anxieties. And it is easy to get lost in the role. When Gabriel and Sam were small, I felt like my mind was a Rolodex of things to remember: the next vaccination, the need to buy milk, the laundry waiting to be folded. It was all I could do to clear some space for thought.

  Leah decided that we—the unemployed mothers of the daycare—should have a program of activities to edify us in the hours between nine in the morning and one in the afternoon. We should go to East Jerusalem: it was important for us—me, Yumiko, Katie, the non-Israelis of the group—to see the real Jerusalem.

  “What’s really going on in this city,” Leah said gruffly, beetling her brows. “It isn’t all lattes and Liberty Bell Park.”

  Leah was trickily proprietary, even of what she loudly claimed were the wrongs of her country; she knew them better than you did and would berate you with them, but if you picked up her cue she would turn around and accuse you of disloyalty, or worse, of not having a stake.

  “Easy for you to say,” she’d sniff, “you have somewhere to go. You understand, there is nowhere for my children. This is all we have. This is our home.”

  Everyone carried the tension of the country differently. I met a woman named Maia at the daycare. She told me that in the worst days of the Intifada, when buses blew up every day, when every backfiring car was cause for panic, she placed a note in her purse that said, “If I am killed, you may not blame my death on terrorism or Palestinians. I died for the sins of an inequitable political system, and the government of Israel is fully responsible for my murder.”

  I said, “That seems a little extreme,” and she said, “Everyone here becomes extreme.”

  Jenna offered to drive us to East Jerusalem—she knew the roads, had family there. Again that mysterious and vaguely threatening word, family. “The roads are awful,” she said, “and my car has four-wheel drive. Afterwards we’ll get tea and sweets at this place I know in Shuafat. They have the best knafeh.”

  “I die for knafeh,” Leah said.

  This was before they each decided that the other was irredeemably crazy, back when they had built an odd and unlikely friendship. When they walked down the street Leah seemed like a mastiff, and Jenna a companion poodle.

  Jenna left Noor with her mother-in-law, and we piled into the car, Leah in front, Jenna driving. All of these women, except Leah, of course, had massive, bloated cars; riding in them was like floating in a zeppelin over the city. Jenna and Leah both seemed to want to play tour guide, Leah quoting us statistics about the lack of classrooms in East Jerusalem, the appalling absence of city services, the general nefarious neglect, Jenna telling us where the best place was to buy hummus and fuls—fava beans mashed with lemon juice and garlic. I couldn’t believe the levels of enthusiasm and nuance people could muster when talking about hummus. I mean, hummus was just—hummus.

  “Pull up here,” Leah ordered, “here. Look!” She pointed to a pyramid of trash on the side of the road, almost as tall as a man. “Look!” she cried, pointing at the blown-out streetlights. “Look!” she said, pointing at a woman enveloped in black cloth from head to foot. “We have a lot to be ashamed of,” she announced, pressing her hands to her generous bosom. Her voice echoed in the car like an organ in a church. “A lot.”

  A woman in a headscarf clutched her son’s hand and glared at us suspiciously as she crossed the street; I took a photograph of another in the blind tent of her niqab. I pressed the display button: the shutter speed was too slow and she had moved, so she seemed like a black ghost against the sharp backdrop of rubbish and fence. “Did you get your picture? Did you get your picture?” Leah asked hysterically, gesturing back at the pile of garbage.

  The road switchbacked up the hill. The streets turned to dirt, and the houses crowded together like crooked teeth, leaning against one another. No signs, no sidewalks, and there were only a few women out, scuttling like hermit crabs along the edges of the road and swathed in layers of fabric.

  “Just a little farther up,” Leah said, “if I haven’t forgotten. I hope I’m not taking us to the wrong place.” We were headed to a Jewish settler’s house in the middle of the Arab quarter. The houses were outposts, established in Muslim neighbourhoods to root a Jewish presence that would make it impossible to divide Jerusalem. They were often funded by donors, and inhabited by young religious families reckless in their zeal.

  Jenna was starting to get nervous. “All I need is for someone from my family to see me here,” she said. “They think I’m a spy already. Anyway, I’m getting hungry. Can we go eat pastry?”

  “There it is,” Leah ann
ounced, ignoring her.

  A tall white building rose up among the crooked little houses, straight sides and shining walls. An Israeli flag hung out like a banner from a priapic pole.

  “Unbelievable.” Leah said. “Stop the car. Stop the car, Jenna, I’m going to get out and tell them what I think.”

  “There’s nowhere to stop,” Jenna said, but she pulled into a narrow niche on the side of the road. A low stone wall separated the makeshift lot from a precipitous drop down the crumbling hillside, littered with plastic bags and empty water bottles.

  Leah got out, stomped across the road, and knocked loudly on the heavy door. “Shalom,” she yelled up to the shuttered windows. “Shalom! Open up the door, please!”

  Jenna leaned on the car, lit a cigarette. “She’s going to fucking get us killed.” More faces started to appear in the windows of the houses around us, expressions both hostile and curious.

  “Let’s go, Leah,” Yumiko called. “Nobody’s there, let’s go already. I’m not even supposed to be here,” she confessed to me, “the consulate would not be happy about this.”

  The door suddenly swung open and closed again behind the straight back of a man in uniform. He was Ethiopian, with a kind, long face, and he wore an Uzi slung across his narrow chest. He smiled at Leah like someone humouring a child or an insane person, said something to her quietly before he vanished behind the door again. She swayed heavily back across the road, her face flushed.

  Jenna had already started the car and swung it around. “Get in, come on, get in,” she said, and Leah huffed at her like an insulted hippopotamus.

  “Our tax dollars,” she said, “our tax dollars guarding that house, picking up that garbage. Nobody else gets their garbage picked up around here.”

  “Nobody here pays their taxes,” Jenna said.

  I leaned forward, “What did he say?”

  “He said that nobody was home,” Leah said. “A lie, I could hear them behind the door. He told me not to make trouble.”