Arabic for Beginners Read online

  The guesthouse has been suffering because it borders on Gaza. The sound of the mortars is disruptive to weekend getaways; the rockets mar the peacefulness of the rural setting. In those old photographs, when I am walking away towards the vanishing point of the desert—what seems to be nothing but open, empty space—I am, in fact, walking towards a border. There were lines all around us, but they were invisible; the perimeter of the kibbutz was always, always patrolled. I just never saw it.

  3.

  Before we planned our year in Israel, I had imagined a frictionless journey—visas flying into our hands, tickets purchased and paid for, a new life waiting for us, fresh and gleaming as a newborn child. Of course, the move was nothing like that. Neither is birth, come to think of it. There were decisions to be made, schools to be found, a renter for our house, a system for our bills, a process so odious and troublesome that it’s a wonder anyone ever goes anywhere. Though once we got there, we could have stayed forever and ever and ever, as the fairytales say. Sometimes I thought we would.

  One reason I agreed to spend the year in Israel was because the winter in Montreal, the one before we left, had been so cold. We had moved because Simon got a job at McGill, and I missed our old life in New York, the structure of graduate school, the proximity of friends and colleagues. I spent an unconscionable amount of time fantasizing about warm places while I was supposed to be working on my dissertation, which I had started right around the time Gabriel was born. As it had done for years, the goddamn dissertation felt farther away from completion, as if I were making the opposite of progress. Sometimes, after dropping the children off in the morning, cleaning up the detritus of our hurried breakfast, and making a desultory pass over the general slovenliness of our apartment, I felt so tired that I went back to bed, and then, before I knew it, it was time to pick the children up again. Each day was colder than the next, and it seemed as though winter might never end.

  Simon often worked late at the university, and I was frequently home alone with the children. Home alone—what an odd way to say it when the truth is I was never alone. Aloneness was the thing that I missed and craved. I loved the boys, but small things constantly undid me. For instance, getting the boys outside was especially difficult that year because Sam had decided that he hated coats and winter boots and would stand at the door in his T-shirt and sneakers, waiting to be let out like an eager and foolish puppy, though it was freezing outside, and I had explained to him a hundred times that in winter he needed to wear a coat.

  So when Simon said he was thinking of applying for a visiting position at Hebrew University, I said, “Oh yes, let’s go,” without thinking about anything except escaping winter, which smelled like wet boots and felt like hunched shoulders and sounded like my children whining forever about their winter clothes and about one another.

  The morning I booked our tickets, Simon was supposed to drive the children to school. He went outside to unbury the car, and when he came back inside he realized he didn’t have his keys.

  “Did you put my keys in some crazy place for some strange reason?” he said, his voice sharp with accusation, and I said, “I absolutely did not.”

  The children were already dressed for the outdoors, sweltering and sausaged in their snowpants and coats and scarves. It was that point in the morning when every moment is precious and perilous, like the scene in a film when the timer is set and the bomb is about to explode, except that we didn’t know how long we had. Sooner or later one or both of the children would start crying or undressing, and then the whole day would fall apart.

  “What did you do with your keys last night?’ I said, my voice too bright, and Simon, “Well, look, if I knew that I’d have my keys, right?”

  I looked at the children, red-faced and overheating by the door, and ran upstairs. I looked on the dresser and under the bed, on the desk and in the pocket of his pants, and could not find them. I ran downstairs, out of breath, and I said, “You better just take the metro, I can’t find them, I’ll take the kids, are you sure you can’t remember what you did with them?”

  Simon said, “I have no idea, maybe I threw them in the fucking snow.” He gave me a furious glance. As he slammed the door Sam threw his hat on the floor and Gabriel started crying.

  It was a stupid and senseless fight, but as I drove the children to school and the daycare—every light red, every driver impatient, the children subdued and silent in the back seat because we had both been yelling—I was furious. When I came home I looked again. I still could not find the keys, and as I looked, in my mind they grew bigger and bigger until they were the size of the whole house, the size of our entire marriage. I spent an hour looking for Simon’s keys before giving up and going outside to buy groceries. The fridge was as bare as the house was cluttered. On my way out the door a glint of black and silver caught my eyes, half buried in the snow.

  By the time Simon came home I had calmed down. When he walked in the door I said, “You will not believe where I found your keys.”

  “Huh,” he said. “They must have fallen out of my pocket.”

  He had a high, clever forehead, and his hairline had recently begun to recede, which made him seem more vulnerable. Behind his glasses, I couldn’t read his eyes.

  “You’re welcome,” I said, and waited for more, but he walked upstairs to his office and shut the door, which meant he was either working or playing computer games somewhere the children and I could not reach him.

  We were in the middle of our thirties, and it was shipwreck weather for marriages. Some of our friends had recently announced that they were separating, others were expecting new babies, and the women we knew with neither husbands nor babies were starting to panic. I had coffee with my friend Andrea that week, and she said, “You just need to have another baby, that’s all.” She was pregnant with her third, and she was radiating the smug bravado of the second trimester. “Another baby, or an affair,” she amended. “It’s your choice.”

  “I don’t think I can have another baby,” I said. “I think it would kill me,” and then I felt immediately guilty as Andrea’s hands went to her stomach and her eyes went wide. I’d never told her about the pit I’d fallen into when the children were born, the nights I went to bed crying and woke up with my face still wet. She didn’t need to know, especially not now. I pressed my lips together.

  The night before he lost his keys, Simon had reached for me in bed, but instead of touching my hip or breast he put his hand on my stomach.

  “Do you ever miss it?” he said.

  “What?” I said. My body had tensed up.

  “Having a baby in there,” he said. “Do you remember when I used to lie next to your stomach and I could see the baby moving, like a wave?”

  “I remember,” I said. My throat was tight.

  “I used to touch you there,” he said, pressing his thumb into my back, “and he would kick. Was it Sam or Gabe? I didn’t think I’d ever forget, but it’s all blurry now.”

  I curled away from him, and closed my eyes. But I didn’t fall asleep for a long time, and I could feel him awake beside me. His breath was restless and strained. Since then something strange had happened. I didn’t know how to describe it except to say that we suddenly seemed to find it impossible to make eye contact. When I looked at him it was as if his eyes slid right around my face to the wall beyond me. Thirty-four years old and in the middle of my fucking life.

  4.

  In Israel, school and work began on Sundays, which made the week feel interminable. Simon was busy trying to establish himself in the Political Science department at the University. He left early and came back late at night. In September, it was still dreadfully hot. I felt the weight of my body, my slow thighs, the pitiless heaviness of the day. By the time I dropped Gabriel and Sam off in the morning, I was drenched and wrung out.

  We were accustoming ourselves to this landscape that was not ours—bougainvi
llea, morning glory, dark and hairy eucalyptus, something that smelled like jasmine but was not jasmine. I was still not used to rounding a corner and seeing the walls of the Old City, the smoky hills in the distance, or the stark bowl of the valley.

  But a pattern began to develop: Simon and I soon knew the names of our children’s teachers, the phone number of a doctor, the closest place to buy milk, the best place to buy vegetables. We knew the neighbourhood, the corner cages where they collected bottles for recycling, the overpriced little stores where we bought ice cream, the best bakery for croissants and the best bakery for cake and the best bakery for bread. We had a library card. However, in the heat of the day it was still a dream life, a haze we walked through until the cool of evening brought some clarity.

  We did not know exactly what we were doing. That was becoming clear. We told each other it would take time. We would settle the children in, and then surely we would feel settled ourselves.

  The year before, Sam had been in daycare with a little boy named Cayden. Cayden was the youngest child in the group; he didn’t talk and didn’t walk and didn’t really play, but spent the day cycling between the laps of the daycare workers. He was a moppet of a child, with a pale and pointed face smaller than his wild mess of curly hair. On the way home one day, Sam had said, in a genuinely puzzled voice, “What is Cayden for?”

  That’s what we were like; we weren’t certain what we were for. It wasn’t that we had ever been for work or habit or routine, all of the things that structured our lives back home, but somehow those things muted the question, or we didn’t have time to ask it. Now, our new freedom had an aimless hollow drift.

  During our first week in Jerusalem, Gabriel learned to read to himself. He had known the letters for a long time, and already knew how to read out loud. He’d even read entire books, although he grappled with each word carefully, as if the word was a lifejacket and he was drowning. Suddenly he could swim. He woke in the morning before we were up, lay out on the black leather couch in his cotton pajama bottoms and his naked, skinny torso. And then, like it was a trick he had performed a thousand times, he vanished into his book.

  The adventure was inside Gabe now; when we spoke to him while he was reading, it was as if the book were the real world and we were faint and spectral. We had to call his name several times before we could get his attention.

  Sam watched him read silently and said, “Look at me! I can count inside my head! Watch!” And then he screwed his face into an expression of hilarious ferocity.

  “How will I do well if I don’t understand anything?” Gabriel asked me on his first day of school.

  “You’re already doing well,” I said. “You’ll always do well if you try your best.” But my heart was in my throat. I knew that he was right to be concerned, and the truth was, I was just as frightened.

  Gabe went to a public school down the road. In his first week, the Prime Minister came to speak to the children. The roads around the school were blocked off, and the corners were congested with men in dark grey uniforms carrying Uzis and exuding aggression. Parents were not allowed in the school that day, and it was strange to see my son’s small back walk straight through that gauntlet. That afternoon, when I picked him up, he told me that the Prime Minister seemed nice. Nice, and very old.

  The next day, the soldiers were gone, and the only guards were the children who did crosswalk duty each day with curious poles that seemed like sabers, which they swept down to block traffic so that their classmates could cross the street. They used their poles and they used their hands, fingers and thumbs pinched together in the ubiquitous gesture that turned your hand into a claw, which at once signified patience—yours—and impatience—theirs. The tsking sound they made with their tongues against the roofs of their mouths was one of the first truly Israeli expressions my children mastered. This raising and lowering of poles, the tsking and tocking of tongues, was a choreographed ballet against the morning stream of traffic, with cars and children’s bodies struggling for priority.

  Gabriel sat in a cramped classroom from nine to three and understood nothing. His schoolbag was half his size, and it broke my heart when he walked into the school in the morning, turtled under its weight. Sometimes at night he was too homesick to sleep, and I lay beside him, cradling his thin brown hand, trying to be enough of a home. It was exciting and painful to watch my boys approach other children with their stilted Hebrew; they were so brave.

  At home we read Harry Potter every night. Sam had me draw a lightning bolt on his forehead in eyeliner, and spent hours in his Batman cape and underpants, dueling with a stick he had picked up in the courtyard. Gabriel was reading about Greek mythology, and one morning at the kitchen table he looked up at me, and spoke tentatively.

  “I think,” he said, “I’ve just thought of something that no other Jewish boy has ever thought about.”

  “What is it?” I asked, and he looked abashed.

  “I don’t think I should tell you,” he said. “I think I should try to forget it.”

  “You can tell me,” I said. “It’s alright.”

  “Well, do you know the stories about Zeus and about Athena,” he said, “how they are all mythology?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He had been reading a lot of D’Aulaire, and we’d been talking about Hera and Zeus, Hades and Persephone.

  “Well, what if the Jewish stories are like that? What if that’s also just mythology?”

  “What if it is?” I said. “Would that matter? What would that change?”

  He looked at his hands, then looked back at me.

  “But there are the miracles,” he said. “The miracles prove it must have really happened.”

  Reassured, he went back to his breakfast cereal.

  Sam was still transparent; he was what he was throughout his whole body, joyful or angry or sad, and sometimes it seemed like we were still the same person. But Gabriel was changing fast, though the change was all inside him. He was becoming more complicated and more internal and more himself, and the person he would be was still a stranger. He started to write stories and they had the structure of the stories he read in books: suspense and then conflict and then resolution. “Rocket knew that something was wrong,” one of them began. But then he would get frustrated that the words did not emerge on the page as smooth and as polished as they were in his head, and our house was full of the crumpled beginnings of his imaginings.

  I knew how that felt. I kept beginning chapters of my dissertation and then abandoning them. When people asked me what I was writing about, my mouth filled with cotton. I tried out different answers, practicing them in front of the mirror. “I’m writing about trauma in contemporary Canadian literature,” I’d say, trying to project confidence. But the one time I tried my blurb on an Israeli, she looked strangely at me and said, “What trauma?” My shoulders began to hurt a lot, as if someone had put their heavy hand on the yoke of my neck.

  The electrical towers on the street had bright yellow signs that showed a cartoon figure falling, electrocuted, off the pole. They said “Danger of Death!” in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. Everything felt dangerous.

  We lived a few blocks away from the promenade that overlooked the Old City. A wide stone road and wall bordered the view, and as one descended into the valley, the paths grew narrower and were lined with olive trees, rosemary bushes, and broad stretches of grass. Sometimes the promenade was crowded with tourists, all taking the very same photograph: themselves, smiling and juxtaposed against the landscape, so that you could have just photoshopped them in. We saw an ultra-orthodox family on a bicycle built for twelve, knees whirling, peyos flapping in unison.

  After dark the promenade was oddly deserted. I took Sam for a walk there one evening, but at night it felt almost haunted. The grass glowed green under the lights, and above the lights the sky was black. There was nobody else on the path. I put my back
into pushing the stroller up the hill and towards the road and then I could hear it, the fast trot behind me, coming closer. I half-turned as three horses rode past me, near enough for me to feel their warm breath. A boy twisted around on one of the horses and rode up to me, pulling up right before the stroller and shouting something I didn’t understand. My son was asleep; I stood there, rigid and unmoving. I couldn’t see the boy’s face. He rode away to catch up with his friends, and I took care not to walk on the promenade in the dark anymore. Three horses, three riders; the experience had felt like a dream. A few weeks later, a couple was stabbed on a nearby path.

  Still, the city was safer than it had been in years. Even taking the bus wasn’t frightening anymore. It had been a couple of years since a bus blew up in the city. Everyone still had the memory of the attacks in their bodies: you could still feel eyes sliding around the bus, looking for abandoned packages, sudden movements, suspicious faces. If you forgot your backpack, you might still return to find a bomb squad blowing it up. That was normal, as customary as the sunset and the traffic jam.