Arabic for Beginners

by Ariela Freedman

  “Don’t have anything to do with those children,” he said. “They should be in school. Look at them, they are not poor, they are well dressed. If you saw that woman in the afternoon, she would be better dressed than you are now.”

  He ran a travel agency.

  “They become used to begging, and the Israeli police won’t kick them out because they like the tourists to think we’re all beggars. Everything is politics up here, all very complicated.”

  He wasn’t interested in my business; he was just bored. I asked to take a picture of the dome mirrored and doubled in his sunglasses, so he tilted his head back for the photo. He drew a business card out of the fanny pack and handed it to me, but the gesture was dutiful rather than in earnest.

  The platform surrounding the Dome of the Rock was mostly empty that day. There was a Japanese tour group bunched together like flowers and holding colourful umbrellas to protect them from the sun. A few clusters of tourists wandered the platform aimlessly. The heat was like weight, and everyone seemed to be moving slowly through the thick air. The dome shimmered in the sun, hallucinatory; under the thin soles of my sandals the marble burned my feet.

  A Chasidic man was skirting the edges of the site. Despite his black hat and long white beard, he reminded me of Professor Calculus from the Tintin comics: he had the same backwards-leaning walk, the same air of deep distraction. He walked back and forth, pacing nervously, but never coming closer. I kept glancing at him,

  wondering what he was doing there. Perhaps he belonged to one of the Jewish groups trying to reclaim the site; but he seemed too anxious and alone. His long black coat flapped against his calves as he walked, turned on his heel, and walked back in the opposite direction, compulsively tracing a border between himself and the shrine.

  I passed the Western Wall and walked back into the market to return the dress. The storekeeper was gone but his son—teenaged, heavy, with soft wide hips—offered to bring me coffee and I waited. I expected a hard sell when he returned, but he didn’t try to sell me anything, only said meaningfully—“We are Bedouin”—and saw me off.

  I thought I would complete the trifecta of holy places, so I walked over to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and drifted between tour groups speaking Hebrew, English, and Russian. I could hear fragments of presentations as I walked through the church. One guide said, “Here, they say, at the time of the crucifixion, the earth shook and cracked.” Another said, “And then they passed the keys and the knowledge of this place, father to son, father to son.” An old monk saw me trying to listen and said, in a British accent, “Excuse me, do you speak English? She is saying that in this place, St. Helen was lifted up to heaven.”

  The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was not one church, but many. Its sovereignty had been carved out among a number of different religious groups; most of them refused to recognize one another. On the roof were the mound-like huts of the Ethiopian Church. In the basement was a small chapel that was claimed by the Greek Orthodox Church and the Armenian Church alike. A bulb had burned out in the chapel and it was left in darkness for months because changing the light would have been an acknowledgment of jurisdiction; neither faction would let the other do it. The darkness down there was truly, appropriately sepulchral and the chapel was closed for months. Finally, the Minister for Religious Affairs had acquired the key from the Nusseibehs, the Palestinian family who had served as doorkeepers for centuries. He went by himself in the middle of the night and changed the light. The chapel opened the next day, illuminated; nobody acknowledged the long squabbling that had resulted in months of darkness, nor even that there ever had been a darkness.

  When I was younger, I had explored those lower chambers. Back then it was not only my first time in the Holy Sepulchre, it was my first time in a church, and the expedition felt daring and confusing. I was struck by that chiaroscuro combination of glitter and shadow, sumptuousness and must. The marble floors had worn into grooves over the centuries from all of those feet and the portentous weight of pilgrimage. It was unclear which parts of the church were open to the public; velvet ropes barred niches blazing with candles, and dark staircases lay unguarded. I walked down one of those staircases. The steps were narrow and uneven, so I needed to brace myself against the wall while climbing down. At the bottom was a low-ceilinged room. Monks milled in a corner near an icon of a saint I didn’t recognize. But what struck me the most about the room, what stayed with me even years later—and stayed with me not as a memory but as an object, in its dimensional and disquieting integrity—was the turd that lay, whole and undisturbed, on the chapel floor. Years later I realized it must have been left by a goat or even a dog—a decade ago animals roamed the church, especially on the lower levels—but at the time it shocked me. I turned and fled up the uneven staircase.

  It’s possible that the person I once was could have stayed in Jerusalem. Not this time, but back when I was eighteen. Or perhaps I could have never been that woman; I was too cautious. I liked risk, but I liked being able to walk away from it, like a book that you close when it gets too frightening. I am the kind of person who could never see a precipice without thinking about jumping off. But I think I would never jump; I just like looking down. Part of me knew we had always been leaving.

  On the stone where they washed Christ’s body people were laying down their trinkets to be blessed. My bag was heavy with last-minute souvenirs. It was time to go home.

  33.

  I was never able to ask Jenna more about our conversation. After Ramallah, I felt like she was avoiding me. It was as if she knew she’d said too much.

  I thought often about what Shayna had said, that I was being an anthropological friend, a perpetual voyeur. I had always gotten in trouble for that. When I was a kid in camp, sitting at the picnic table, one of my bunkmates had said, “Why are you always doing that?” “What?” I said, and she said, “You’re always looking at people.” The trouble was, I didn’t know any other way to be. How did people not look—I mean, what were you supposed to do with your eyes?

  But I did see Jenna one last time.

  She invited me over to her house so that the children could say goodbye. Jenna looked tired again, the two bruised half-moons under her eyes, her hair falling out of the ponytail at the base of her neck. She saw me looking at her, and pulled self-consciously at her striped sweater.

  “God. I’ve been so tired. I’m getting up to pee all night.”

  She put the children in front of the television set, tore open a family pack of potato chips, and scooped labne into a bowl. Now they were sitting in a row on the couch, dipping their hands in and out of the bag of chips as their eyes stayed glued to the screen, and my heart sunk as I thought of the supper I had not yet made, that they would no longer eat.

  Still, I walked over to the bowl of chips and took a barbecue one, curved and corrugated like a shell, and slipped it into the bowl of labne that the children had left untouched, the smooth cheese so creamy and stiff that the chip could have stood upright. I put it in my mouth and the combination of tart and cold and salty and sweet was so good that it was as if my tongue had started humming. It was a revelation.

  I took another bite and said, “This may be the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my life.”

  Jenna said, “I always eat my chips this way, it’s the only way to do it. I buy the American Lays even though they’re more expensive, because they’re the best, and this is the best labne, I can show you where to get it.”

  Then she grabbed a handful of chips.

  “You know,” she said. “I used to think about doing what you do.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “You know,” Jenna said, “being a writer. A journalist or something. When I was a kid, I used to love to write. I had a notebook, and I wrote little stories all the time. Crazy things happen to me. I could write a whole book about it, believe me.”

  I didn’t do muc
h writing anymore. In fact, I had decided, after that inertial year, to give up on my poor and neglected dissertation, the shrunken child of my distracted mind. I didn’t know what I would do next, but the decision had made me feel lighter. I didn’t have to drag it around anymore, like a school bag that was stuffed with old papers and notes, or like the ghost of my father. I could do—I didn’t know what I would do, but I could do anything else, anything.

  Jenna looked wistful, and then she shrugged.

  “But who has time for that, anyway? Come into the kitchen and talk to me while I cook,” she said. I followed her, looking back at the bowl of chips, floating a hopeful, “Boys, don’t take too many,” at my children, who nodded without looking up and kept on chewing.

  Noor followed Jenna into the kitchen, clambered to the counter like a rock climber, hoisting her body with her chubby arms. Jenna looked over, reaching out a practiced and steadying hand.

  “Yeah, she just learned to do that,” Jenna said. “As if life isn’t difficult enough. Now that’s all she wants to do is to be on the counter.”

  Keeping one hand on Noor, Jenna reached under the sink for a jug of vegetable oil, and poured freely into a battered and enormous pot. Noor reached for the spitting oil, and Jenna swatted her back, reached over, and placed her firmly on the floor. Noor stood stock-still and reached her arms up. She began to emit a whine that lived somewhere in her upper palate, and Jenna reached back down and swept her back up to the counter, an arm’s length away from the boiling oil. From the next room I could hear the pat-a-pat-pat of a machine gun from the television. They must have changed the channel. I said, “Should I go check what they’re watching?”

  Jenna said, “It’s just a cartoon, don’t worry about it.”

  I stood suspended between the boiling oil, the baby and the machine gun fire, and I thought, Why Jenna, why does this always happen with Jenna. Then the sound of the gun was replaced by a cartoon cackle and the sound of the children laughing and Noor decided to wander back into the living room and it was as if the room had exhaled, had turned from the theatre of impending accident and horror to just an ordinary kitchen and ordinary children having a good time.

  Jenna sniffed hard. “I can still smell that damn cat,” she said.

  “What cat?” I said, my attention shifting back from the living room.

  Jenna said, “Well, let me start at the beginning. My sister-in-law has this housekeeper, and she’s terrified of her. She says she can see the future. But I don’t believe in that. So I said, ‘Let me come over and talk to her. Only, don’t tell her anything about me. We’ll see if she’s faking it.’ So I came over and the housekeeper said, ‘Something is going to make you very happy.’ I said, ‘Yeah, like what?’ Anyone could say that. That could mean anything. So she said, ‘Maybe furniture.’ It’s true that our new couch was coming. Still, it didn’t convince me. Everybody buys

  furniture. Then she said, ‘I see a weight on you. Something heavy.’ ‘What is it?’ I said. She said, ‘I can’t see.’ Anyway, then she said, ‘There’s an animal—is there an animal that bothers you?’ And there is, this black cat that I hit once with my car. ‘Well, he has something against you,’ she said. And I thought of this other cat that used to come to my window and open the screen by himself. It drove me crazy, but anyway, I hadn’t seen the cat for a few days. ‘He’s going to come back,’ she said, and I said, ‘When?’ She said, ‘More than three days, less than three months.’ And three weeks—three weeks exactly—the cat came back again. That made me think. The housekeeper said, ‘It’s a spirit, that cat, it’s an angry spirit. Like a lost child.’ And that was when I got really scared. Though, I guess everyone knows that about me, they just have to have read the paper. So I don’t think she can really read minds, though I don’t really want to see her again.”

  “Knows what?” I said, suddenly alert.

  “Oh god,” she said. She turned off the stove and the room was filled with silence. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  I waited.

  She said. “Everybody talks all the time at that daycare. I thought everyone knew. I guess it was a while before you came.”

  She leaned back against the counter, and crossed her arms tightly against her chest. Her extraordinary river-green eyes. She looked older than I’d ever seen her look.

  “Before Noor. There was another boy. His name was—well, never mind his name, that’s bad luck. It was one of those things at five months, crib death. SIDS. Nobody knows what happened. That’s why I’m having this one, to replace him.”

  Her hand drew a half circle on her stomach. I suppose I’d known without knowing why she looked tired and a little heavier, but my eyes still widened and I drew in a breath.

  “Anyway, it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. It’s the worst thing that can ever happen to anyone. And Aden’s family, you know what they’re like, they said it was my fault, they were talking about me behind my back, telling stories. Some people don’t have a life, so they have to spend all their time making bullshit up about other people.”

  I moved towards her, but she shuddered as if to shake me off. She turned off the stove and then turned her back on me, towards the sink, and started washing dishes.

  “I’m going to finish these, and take you home,” she said.

  From the back you couldn’t see the way her stomach was starting to pull at her sweater. She was herself as narrow as a child, with her brown and bowed neck, all knobs and hollows, and the clipped and vulnerable wings of her delicate shoulderblades.

  34.

  On our last day in Jerusalem, Simon and I took the kids to the park. We were packed, and at loose ends. We had said our goodbyes. That day the sky had the quality of a bowl of water filled to its rim; it seemed on the verge of spilling over, to be barely containing itself, mirthful, irrepressible, and filled with light.

  I sat beside Simon, and he reached for my hand. We looked at the boys on the swings. I could see that over the year they had changed. They were stronger, less soft. Their faces were a little thinner and more mature. They were more confident, too—they owned the park now. They were pumping the swings as hard as they could, until they rose almost parallel to the ground, and when they jumped it seemed like they hung in the air for just a moment before plummeting to the sand.

  Gabe paused on the bench beside me to rest.

  “How do you feel?” I said. “How do you feel about leaving? Are you sad?”

  “A bit sad,” he said, “I’m also excited to go home.”

  Simon squeezed my hand.

  And we went home, to our cold and quiet country. I thought that we would feel at home right away, but sometimes when you travel you become a stranger everywhere. I missed the intensity of Israel, the liveliness and loveliness, missed even things I thought I would never miss, like the strangers who accosted you in line at the supermarket and told you what to buy.

  Then habit took over, and we became ourselves again.

  Simon settled into work, and the boys settled into school. I started working in the library part-time, and that leaves me time to pick up the children and to volunteer at the school. We are pretty happy. There isn’t much of a story in that.

  It’s been years now that we’ve been back. The boys have grown even longer and thinner, and they don’t remember much about our year in Israel. To me, too, it seems more like a dream than a memory. I’ve mostly lost touch with Jenna, and that makes sense. It was a friendship of convenience, after all. Every so often I click on her Facebook page to see the changed faces of her children, which like mine have grown narrower, less babyish. There was a baby boy born that winter, and since then there have been another two children. They look like Noor to me since Noor was still a baby when I left.

  I rarely leave a message for Jenna, but the strange thing is, I think about her all the time. Sometimes in the winter when the ground is covered in snow and th
e sky is the colour of an oyster shell, all luminous layers of grey and silver and smoke, and the sun goes down at four o’clock, and I’m waiting for my children to come home with all the mothers waiting for all the children to come home, and nothing could be farther away than that desert city nestled like a pearl in the seven hills under the relentless blue sky, I sit at the window for just a little longer looking at the disappearing light and I think of Jenna, I think of the baby that died and of the babies that I never met. I think of Jenna.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s mentorship program, and to Elise Moser for her guidance and support.

  To the friends and family who read this book in various stages and incarnations—Sandie, Jeremy, Imma, Menachem, Elana, Julie, Emily, Bill, Anne Mette, Sivan, Zara, Katharine, Ivana, Alyssa, David, Norm—I am so lucky to have your support and encouragement.

  My thanks and love to Orit, Avidan, to friends and family, too many to list, and to my students and colleagues at the Liberal Arts College. My father introduced me to the world of books, and I wish he could read this one.

  My deep thanks to Linda Leith and to the editorial, publicity, and production staff at Linda Leith Publishing.

  Jer, Ben, Lev, this book and all my love is yours.