Arabic for Beginners

by Ariela Freedman

  “The war’s going to be over by Friday,” she said. “Did you hear? The Venezuelans kicked out the Israeli embassy. There’s gonna be so much international pressure that Israel is going to have to withdraw.”

  She took a slow drag on her cigarette.

  “Nobody likes Hamas. But Israel is worse. And anyway, it’s the end of days. I think he’s here already,” she said, “the antichrist. Know who he is? That magician, I forget his name. The one who flew over the Grand Canyon. The one who made the Statue of Liberty disappear.”

  “David Copperfield?” I said.

  She nodded emphatically. “David Copperfield. That’s right. You know, I saw him perform once. Aden bought us both tickets. And he sawed a woman in half right on stage, and I had to leave. I said to Aden, ‘He sold his soul to Satan and Satan gave him power.’ You know, that’s how magicians get their power, they bargain with Satan. And I really think it might be him. How else could he do that?”

  “It’s just tricks,” I said. I never could tell when she was joking. I mean, as far as I knew, she had never made a joke. “Anyway,” I said, “isn’t that stuff from the Book of Revelations? Do Muslims even have an end of days?”

  “Oh yes,” she said solemnly. “I keep trying to read the Koran but I can’t because I get scared. There’s going to be a long period of peace and then a huge war. Almost everyone will die. That’s why the Arabs and the Jews keep fighting,” she said, “because they’re afraid. They’re trying to prevent that long peace, because after that it’s going to be the end.”

  It was a strange day to hear about Jenna’s cousin, because I was going to Pride that very afternoon. The streets had been blocked off since the morning. When I walked to the daycare, I had to navigate a cordon of ropes, and men and women in grey uniforms and sunglasses lined the sidewalk. A few years earlier police had increased security at the parade, after a man was stabbed. Ultra-Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Muslims agreed on the immorality of homosexuality; many factions in the city wanted to shut the parade down. There would be no cheering

  audience, only the police, unsmiling behind their dark glasses. We would meet at the Liberty Bell Park, would walk through metal detectors, be patted down; we would then, in near-silence, walk the six empty downtown blocks to the park where they held the festival, where eighties cover bands would serenade us with cheesy songs.

  These were the last stroller days, and I was enjoying the ability to dictate where Sam went. The movement of the stroller and the heat of the day put him into a stupor. He took a rainbow flag and waved it proudly. A few journalists came and took his picture; there were only a few children at the parade. He smiled at them and sat up straighter. He didn’t know what Pride meant. He liked the costumes, liked the flag. The line near the metal detectors was jammed up, and it was very hot. None of the political parties had bothered to show up, except for the Communists. Some of our friends had gone to Tel Aviv for Pride because it was a better party.

  Past the metal detectors people sat in desultory groups. I didn’t see anyone I knew. There was a group of men and women in their army uniforms, and men wearing kippot who wore T-shirts that said “Proud and Orthodox,” “gaeh vedati”—in Hebrew, the words meant several things at once, “proud to be gay,” “proud to be Orthodox,” and in a Hebrew/English pun, “Gay and Orthodox.” Vendors sold glow sticks and popsicles, and there was a parachute, for no real reason. Once past the bottleneck of the metal detectors, we were a sparse group as we walked down the street. A boy, almost a man, walked alone, wrapped in a rainbow flag. His jaw was set and he seemed very serious. Indeed, there was a seriousness about the entire parade; it felt like a dirge rather than like a celebration, despite the two men in tight white T-shirts and rabbit ears who preened for pictures and held signs that quoted the Israeli poet Leah Goldberg, “And one is allowed, allowed to love.” Journalists took photo after photo of them, zooming in, and I realized that if they’d zoomed out the picture wouldn’t have depicted much of a story: a few people, not many, had showed up to march down an empty street in an ancient city.

  Jenna was right about one thing, at least. The war ended that week. Faster than seemed possible, the media focus turned to national elections. One of the parties poised to take a significant number of seats was called “Israel Beiteinu,” meaning “Israel is our home,” a party whose name announced its ultra-nationalist aspirations. Their leader, Avigdor Lieberman, was notorious for advocating that Palestinians be expelled to Jordan, and for arguing that Israeli Arab citizens must swear allegiance to the Jewish state or be stripped of their citizenship. He was famous for other reasons, too: he was under investigation for money laundering, and had also once been taken to trial for hitting a child who had bullied his son. None of this seemed to have hurt his political fortunes. Meanwhile, Ehud Barak, once the great hope of the left and then its great betrayer, was trying to capitalize on the war by emphasizing his “security credentials.” Invoking Vladimir Putin in an attempt to appeal to the increasingly important Russian vote, he said, “We will hit the terrorists while they are sitting on the toilet!” His posters showed a stern, unsmiling face: underneath it said, “Barak Lo Sachbek,” “Barak is not your friend.” I thought it was hilarious, and then tragic, that candidates in Israel ran on their unlikability. But of course it meant he was a tough guy, he’d be unyielding when negotiating with Arabs. Ironically, sachbek was one of the many words taken from Arabic that had been absorbed into the Hebrew vernacular.

  The daycare had also recently been in the news because one board member had a nephew who was an astronaut. The astronaut had volunteered to take a preschool banner along with him on his next mission to space. A tremendous amount of energy and excitement had gone into the crafting of the banner and the newspaper showed many photographs of lovely children leaning over and helping in its construction. But it was hard not to conclude that there was an irony to his quest; that co-existence worked best in a vacuum.

  29.

  That year Martine was the first of the daycare mothers to leave. I barely knew her; her son was in a different group. Her husband was being transferred to Belgium, which in the embassy world was a promotion, though it seemed to me that after the bright madness of Jerusalem, grey Belgium would be dull.

  She invited me to meet the ladies for drinks to see her off. Yumiko was also going away, to Japan for a month, though she would be back. Katie was coming for drinks, and Jenna, and Diane, who was an embassy employee rather than an embassy spouse. I’d never met Diane; the consulate women I knew treated her with a wary respect. They were a little bit disdainful of her husband, for being the one to tag along; they talked about the awkwardness of having him at play dates. And she was to be admired but not to be trusted, or at least that was what I’d picked up from Katie and Yumiko, though I wasn’t certain exactly why. Sometimes I suspected that they disliked her because she had kept her career, and they had left theirs behind. She had a son, whose brilliance she talked about all the time. She had a daughter with cerebral palsy, of whom she never spoke.

  I walked down to the restaurant after my boys were in bed. It was not quite dark, but the main road was deserted. Parked cars blocked my view of the road, and I walked quickly. That stretch of Hebron Road was a wasteland. Massive apartment buildings fronted the street. Their windows were lit, but their courtyards lurked in shadow.

  I could hear footsteps. A young man came up beside me. It was hard to see his face in the dark, but he had a scruffy half-beard and almost-mullet. He held a plastic bag open as if it contained contraband.

  “Thirty shekels,” he said breathlessly, “only thirty shekels.”

  I kept my face forward and walked faster. A couple was approaching us, heading in the other direction. In the streetlight their faces were wan and drained of emotion. The boy was almost jogging to keep up with me, and I kept repeating, “No, thanks,” in Hebrew.

  A young woman I knew had recently been mugged, rig
ht in this neighbourhood. A teenage boy pulled a knife on her and took her wallet; it was early evening, and the whole thing happened so fast that nobody had been able to help her. When she told me about the mugging, she said he was an Arab boy, and when I asked her how she knew she looked annoyed and flustered. But the police had found her wallet a few days later, and they’d found the thief. He was one of the Jewish teens who lived in the low-income housing complexes.

  Because of the mugging, I was nervous as the boy reached into his bag.

  “Excellent quality!” the boy said. Instead of a knife he pulled out a box. It held a pair of beige nylon underwear, the kind that pulls up over your stomach to hold you in—grandmother underwear, with a young model on the front who looked sullen about being made to wear something so unnecessarily matronly. I wanted to laugh; I’d been mugged by a pair of bad underpants. He pulled the underwear out of the box and they dangled from his hand, limp in that obscene shade called “flesh-colour.”

  I shook my head, resolute. This time instead of speaking Hebrew I said in Arabic, “La, shukran.” His accent had tipped me off. This time his eyes glinted in recognition and he started to babble at me in Arabic as I realized that wasn’t the way to get rid of him at all. Where was I from and what was my name and how had I learned Arabic and a hundred other things that I didn’t understand because I didn’t really know Arabic, I was only just keeping up with the weekly homework and seemed to forget as quickly as I learned. Salem would have been disappointed in me.

  The couple in the streetlight passed us, and he bounded after them, interrupting their tense silence in his search for more receptive customers. I could see the man waving his plump hands to get rid of him, but I was glad to have lost him, the persistent boy with the grandma underwear who spoke too quickly and whose enthusiasm had something desperate about it. I was almost through Abu Tor when I heard footsteps behind me again, this time a rapid tattoo on the sidewalk. I was being pursued. I didn’t want to look around, didn’t want to seem afraid. Around me were closed doors and shuttered windows, and I wasn’t exactly frightened but I wondered if I ought to be as I tried to walk faster without breaking into a run, because a run would make me look weak.

  He caught me before the corner. With one hand he reached for my elbow. The other hand was holding a paper cone of flowers, carnations and baby’s breath. He offered these to me, smiling.

  “I can’t take those,” I said in English, and then, “No thank you,” in Arabic again.

  He pushed the flowers towards me, and mustering the very limits of my vocabulary I said in Arabic, thinking of Greta Garbo, “I want to be alone!”

  He looked wounded and turned back, the flowers head-down towards the sidewalk. I realized two things as I walked the last block to the restaurant. First, for as long as I lived, no one would ever pursue me down the street with flowers again—this was the closest I would ever get to an extravagant romantic gesture, as odd as it had been. And second, I’d completely screwed up my sentence, the sentence I had been working on in my head that entire long walk. I’d meant to say, “I want to be by myself,” but I didn’t know how to say “to be”; instead I’d said something closer to “do it,” “I want to do it alone,” “I want to do it by myself” or “to myself.” I must have frightened or shocked him.

  The Old City lay in a pool of light. The moon was full and swelled with import. The ladies had found a spot on the terrace of the restaurant. They had been drinking for a while when I arrived. Jenna was there, with Yumiko and Katie, but I barely knew Martine, or the other consulate ladies who together formed a strange tribe. Sometimes I saw them coming from the exercise room at the YMCA, in their yoga pants and tank tops; sometimes I saw them picking up their children in the early afternoon, washed and showered and made up. They were talking about possible next postings. Martine had lucked out: Belgium was boring but it was civilized and in Europe. Their husbands needed to rotate through conflict zones in order to advance in their careers; at least there was danger pay, enough to make a down payment on a house in Washington. There was a good American school in Abu Dhabi. There were good embassy parties in Cairo.

  It amazed me how little curiosity most of them had about the place where they had landed. Yumiko and Katie were exceptions; Yumiko, because she was already a stranger in America, and had chosen to try to learn the language and immerse herself in the society, and Katie, because she knew the Middle East and loved it in all of its painful contradictions. But most of the women couldn’t care less. They had fortified their bubbles; they had narrowed their sights. They lived in a small, self-contained world filled with its own rivalries and desires and ambitions, and Israel wasn’t particularly real to them. I wish I could say that their husbands—who were, after all, responsible for implementing and informing American policy in the region—seemed more invested, but in the few conversations we’d had they treated the region like a set of abstract problems that they knew best how to fix. They were frustrated by Israeli bullishness and intransigence; they seemed to honestly believe that all the problems of the Middle East could be solved, if not for the pigheadedness of the Arabs and the Jews.

  I told Katie about my encounter, and she laughed at me. “What exactly did you say?” she asked, but I had already forgotten, and kept trying out new possibilities. She told me the right way to say that I wanted to be alone, and I repeated it and then promptly forgot. “Poor boy,” she said. “He probably had no idea what was going on.”

  The food at the restaurant was magnificent: smoked eggplant drizzled with buttermilk sauce and jewelled with pomegranate seeds, sweet potato ravioli in cream sauce, focaccia with honeyed dates and goat cheese. The consulate spouses ate like women eat, with exaggerated ravished faces and exclamations about the deliciousness of the food and with tiny, measured bites. They drank quite a lot.

  They were talking about one of their colleagues. He had a mistress, a Palestinian Christian woman. He’d taken her to the embassy for screening four months earlier, which meant they asked her all kinds of questions about her politics and family in order to make sure that the affair was safe for the embassy. “I knew about it first,” Katie bragged. Since she had been working at the consulate she liked knowing everybody’s secrets. Once she had given Sam and me a lift home, and waved at an Israeli man walking down the street. “He’s a spy,” she announced,

  rolling up the windows. He’d seemed like an ordinary man, a family man, walking home with two plastic bags of groceries, a child holding onto his shirt. “How do you know?” I said, and she snorted. “Trust me.” Nobody was supposed to know, but everyone knew, of course, everyone knew everything at the consulate. The same was true of the mistress. Everyone knew, except his wife. And it made a certain amount of sense to have the mistress screened, too, from the standpoint of security: it minimized the chances of blackmail, and the odds of betrayal.

  Some of the men had even met her, though none of the wives had: Roger mentioned that David brought her out for drinks late one night after work. Katie asked if she was pretty. “Pretty? She was cute enough,” Roger said. A few weeks later the wife had come home to her bags packed, and a ticket home. The affair had become serious and now the husband was ready to ship his wife back to the States. And there was nothing she could do about it; no license to work in the country, no right to keep living in the beautiful apartment with its roof terrace and view of the walls of the Old City. She was gone.

  “That could happen to any of us,” Martine said, picking up her glass of white wine. “None of us have any rights here, and the embassy just wants to keep things quiet. We’re disposable.”

  “Your husband would never do that,” Katie said. She did not say anything about her own.

  Nobody had liked the wife: they’d all made fun of her, at first behind her back and then, daringly, to her face. She was older than they were, and her husband was higher up in the consulate; she had expected deference. And she was from the Midwest, and d
idn’t curse, and wore pale skirt suits that hit at the knee, and cut her hair to look like Laura Bush. But now that she was gone their loyalty had shifted back; she’d been condescending but kind, they agreed. And she did host a tea party every time a new wife moved in. She would tell them where to buy groceries, and where to buy socks, and where they could send their kids to school. And where they weren’t allowed to go, and what they weren’t allowed to do. Now someone else would have to take on that role: “Hostess-Initiator.”

  “Only fourteen couples now,” Katie said to Martine. The adulterous husband was being shipped to Cairo; rumour had it that his mistress would follow him. “And half of them are Mormons. They don’t even count. And now you’re leaving to Belgium, and Yumiko and Hannah are leaving at the end of the year, and I’m going to be here all by myself.”

  “There’s Lisa,” Martine said.

  “But you know Lisa,” Katie said. “First of all, she doesn’t have children. And second of all, she seems so busy all the time. What is she doing?”

  “Belly dancing lessons,” Martine said.

  “Arabic class,” Yumiko said.

  “No,” Katie said. “I bet she’s having an affair.”

  An affair! They leaned in, speculating about the young Israeli soldier, or Palestinian shopkeeper, or security guard that Lisa might be fucking. Lisa was younger than all of them by ten years; she didn’t have children, so she wasn’t domesticated yet. She wore pale linen dresses, said she was writing a novel, and spent hours at the cafe in the American Colony Hotel.

  “Why not,” Jenna said. “Serves them right. They’re all messing around anyway.”

  I’d recently replaced my wedding ring and I showed it around the table. It had fallen off my finger one winter two years earlier. That wasn’t the first time I’d lost it; once, it flew into the sand at the beach, and I scrabbled for it desperately until I saw the telling and unlikely glint of gold. I’d thought it lost forever. Another time I’d believed the ring gone for months before finding it in the crevice between the couch and wall. But that last time it was lost for good; the ring must have slipped off my finger when I was taking off my gloves and buried itself in the snow. I wonder, sometimes, if anybody ever found it. I didn’t want to replace it right away. I kept saying that the ring would surely turn up, surely. The price of gold had risen; I said I didn’t want to spend the money. But the truth was I was feeling tired of being owned. Already, I was so consumed with the children when I was home; I didn’t like walking around the city tagged. I wanted myself to myself.