Arabic for Beginners Read online

  Though a boy had driven his new BMW into a wall through crowd of soldiers near Jaffa Gate. Jenna knew the family.

  “It’s not a terrorist attack,” she said. “He just got that car. Why wouldn’t he use an old car if he wanted to destroy it? There is no way he would have driven that car into a wall—he loved it.”

  His family said that he’d been driven to despair after being turned down by the cousin that he wanted to marry. They were afraid, surely, of being punished for his actions. But the boy couldn’t tell anyone the reason he’d driven into the wall. An off-duty officer with a quick pistol shot him dead within seconds of his driving into the square.

  The President was being investigated for rape. The Prime Minister, for corruption. And new national elections were coming too. I read the paper in the mornings with a mixture of fascination and horror. “I can’t believe you are still reading the newspapers,” our friends said. It was a rookie mistake, they maintained; we would learn, as they all had.

  5.

  I frequently returned to Israel in my youth. But I hadn’t been back since my first year of university. Since then, I had travelled to India, Morocco, Turkey, all over Europe. At first, I hadn’t thought of this as deliberate avoidance; it was just time to explore other places, that was all. Staying away from Israel, I had gone all over the world.

  When I was fifteen, I spent the summer in Israel with a group of teenagers. We travelled for five weeks, each day or two moving to a different location, sleeping on the bus, crossing the country back and forth. Our counselors yelled themselves hoarse, partly from enthusiasm and partly because otherwise it was difficult to be heard, since we were so loud and undisciplined. We climbed up the snake path at Masada, prayed at the Western Wall, swam in the Sea of Galilee, canoed down the Jordan River. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of kids like us in the country that summer on organized tours, swarming like locusts, consuming all the pizza and falafel and ice cream and tacky souvenirs that the Holy Land had to offer. We travelled in groups all the time, slept four or six to a room, crammed around campfires and picnic tables, as if the very thought of solitude was threatening. We sang songs together in one voice; we all wore blue and white on Shabbat in imitation of the flag. We bought versions of the same Magen David necklaces to wear around our necks, as if it weren’t already clear enough who we were.

  That week we were over the Green Line in the West Bank though we called it Judea and Samarea, by the biblical names of the places and ancient cities. I was taken aback by the barbed wire fence that surrounded the settlement. At the checkpoint we drove through, the guard—barely older than we were—had a heavy gun strapped across his hip.

  Of course, we had grown used to the sight of guns; we had our own “noseh neshek” on the bus with us, a young soldier whose assignment was our safety and who was referred to by the name of his weapon. The boys on the trip were fascinated with his gun, and kept asking to hold it, though he always said no. The bolder girls flirted with him, especially a girl from Baltimore who had bleached hair and heavily lined eyes like Madonna and who surprised us all one morning by convulsing on the floor of the bus, the permed fleece of her hair all over her face, her mascara smeared, so she looked like she had given herself two black eyes.

  The kibbutz was in a beautiful spot, the Judean hills like the gentle humps of vast animals against the horizon. There was a wall of bougainvillea outside the dining hall, and people rode their bikes up and down the green paths as if they were in a hippie version of paradise. They put us in bunks that resembled our camp cabins back home, and we hurried to claim our beds, the hierarchy firmly established so that without speaking we all knew where we lay. Sunset was a performance that night, concentrated and flashy. Dinner in the dining hall—challah, chicken soup and chicken, salad and kugels—was a variation on a theme so familiar we knew all its chords, unlike the Israeli breakfasts that had staggered us all with their cold tomatoes and cucumbers, hard-boiled eggs, and disappointing lack of North American cereals.

  Shabbat slowed us down. We usually arrived at our next destination on a Friday morning, to give us enough time to get ready for Friday night and Saturday. There were extensive preparations to be made, hair to be washed and blow-dried, make-up bags as heavy and glittering as sacks of treasure, photos to be taken before we lit the candles, our arms draped around each other’s shoulders, our mouths set in rigid grins. There was never enough hot water for the showers, were never enough mirrors as we shouldered each other out of the way to make sure that we were beautiful.

  For the girls with boyfriends, Shabbat was the time to hook up. They vanished after dinner, vanished Saturday afternoons, or sometimes, if they were long established, paired up with other couples as if practicing for future suburban barbecues.

  The unpaired among us mostly slept. We slept so little, all week long, and were constantly on the move—the epileptic fit on the bus was triggered by lack of sleep and inconstant diet. I’ve never again experienced a sleep as heavy as the naps I took those Shabbat afternoons, which could last until five or six, when somebody woke us up for supper.

  I was fascinated and repelled by the couples who seemed to be rehearsing for their adult lives. Most of them would be married young, within the next four or five years. As it turned out, so would I, though at the time I would have never believed it—I was convinced, in those days, that I would always be alone.

  That Shabbat I took a walk instead of sleeping. A group of us was going for a walk outside of the settlement, accompanied by some of the teenagers from the kibbutz. And the local teens fascinated me; they seemed harder than we were, and more experienced. Two of the local boys took guns with them, and I was surprised, less at the guns than at the transgression of Shabbat: two averahs, “transgressions,” eruv and muktza, “carrying outside of a specific domain” and “using something that should have no purpose on the Sabbath.” “Preserving your life trumps both of those,” they said, and the other boys, our boys, looked in envy at the handguns they had tucked into the backs of their pants.

  From the kibbutz the surrounding hillsides had looked empty; white rocks jutting out of the curved earth like vertebrae, silvery green groves of olive trees, their trunks gnarled and full of character. But as we left the gated kibbutz and walked on a winding road down the hillside, it became apparent that other people lived here, too. They sat on their front steps in groups, drinking coffee, playing backgammon, and looking at us from under lowered eyelids. Most of them were old men. We had taken a dog with us from the kibbutz, a rowdy, friendly retriever. The dog barked loudly and seemed less friendly as we walked by these houses, wheeling up and down the paths. The men gathered their robes and looked scared and angry. One of the boys, whistling, took his gun out of his waistband and clicked the safety on and off a few times. In the quiet of the hills, the sounds echoed. The group was loud and high-spirited; I straggled behind. The boys walked in the middle of the street, and a car driving behind them was forced to slow to a crawl until it reached a turn in the road. I wanted to ask them why they were clicking the safety, why they were walking in the middle of the road and acting so generally obnoxious, but I didn’t have the right words in Hebrew and anyway, they were now far ahead of me and I had to run, sweaty and panting, back to the gate of the kibbutz.

  Everyone knows the code. You don’t tell on your friends, and even if they aren’t your friends, you are supposed to preserve the silent solidarity of your generation. Telling a grown-up is weak. Beyond weak, it’s pathetic; it means you’ve forfeited your place among the adolescent community.

  Of course I told on them right away, and as it always did, it got beyond me. I meant to just tell my counsellor about the incident, but he went straight to some of the senior members of the kibbutz, and they came to see me, their faces serious but also pitying.

  “And you are telling us that our boys did it on purpose?”

  “You understand that this is a serious accusa
tion.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like living here. And besides, they never would have behaved that way—I know those boys, they are good boys.”

  “And why did you go with them?”

  They reassured me that nothing like that had ever happened, that the misunderstanding was all mine, and besides, it wouldn’t happen again. And then I had to face my peers.

  “Hannah, why did you have to tell?” one girl said, speaking for them all, her voice thick with disapproval. For a few days, before something else happened to displace my shame—a boy smuggled liquor into his hotel room and broke a lamp—no one would talk to me, but I heard hard whispers everywhere I went.

  I was mortified. I was indiscreet, had overreacted, had told the wrong person, shouldn’t have told at all, was marked by my priggishness as surely as if my virginity was stamped onto my forehead. I cried myself to sleep like a baby, compounding my shame; I tried to imagine scenarios in which I hadn’t told, in which I hadn’t gone on the walk at all, had stayed prone and unconscious. I can close my eyes and see them still: the low bungalows, the small groups of men on the doorsteps, the late summer haze, and a group of teenagers walking down the middle of the street as if they owned the road, owned the village, owned the sun and owned the air and owned the men who stared at them with equal parts fear and resentment.

  6.

  I ended up spending a lot of time with a group of mothers from the daycare. We had a window of about four hours a day in which we could make our own choices, undetermined by the demands of three-year-olds. We went out for coffee after depositing the children in their classrooms. We went to the park at one o’clock when classes let out, and then had play dates at one another’s houses, more for us than for our children, who played politely beside each other rather than playing together. We were all trapped in that bell jar of early parenthood, madly in love with tiny creatures that bored us to death. We diverted each other, the women who were free all day long but never really free at all.

  The preschool was advertised as Jewish and Muslim, with classes in Hebrew and in Arabic. It would take me some time to learn that many years earlier, half of the classes had switched to a unilingual Hebrew curriculum. They couldn’t afford to run the school solely on the income of the bilingual classrooms; there wasn’t enough interest. And there was strange slippage in the language around the school. “Jews and Arabs,” the director would say in interviews, flashing her lipsticked smile, or, “Jews and Muslims.” But the school was located in the YMCA, a fulcrum for the Christian community in Jerusalem. Many of the students were Christian, the Palestinians and Israelis and expats alike. Somehow nobody ever mentioned them. The Hebrew classes were filled with Israeli Jews, but the bilingual classes had become strikingly international. In Sam’s class the children spoke Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, German, Turkish, and Swedish, but mostly English, to my disappointment and relief.

  Only a few parents—and those mostly Jews—sent their children to the YMCA because the school reflected their politics. Then there were the internationals, the UN and embassy affiliates, and the sabbaticants like me, who found in the daycare an idealized image of a country they were only passing through. And for some of the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian parents, the daycare was an entry into Israeli society, a way to ensure their children were fluent in Hebrew and could pass easily between the Arab and Jewish parts of the city.

  I asked Jenna why she sent her children to the daycare, and she said, “Well, I want them to speak Hebrew. Without an accent. And this is a very good daycare, they get music, they go swimming. Education is important to us, to Aden and me. Aden wants them to go to one of those British schools when they grow up, Oxford or Yale.”

  “Yale isn’t in Britain,” I said.

  She looked at me blankly and said, “It is.”

  Jenna’s mother was Puerto-Rican, but her father was Palestinian. They both lived in the United States, and her father hadn’t been able to return in a dozen years. She was unpopular in her extended family, she said, because her father had left his Palestinian first wife for her Puerto-Rican mother.

  “They didn’t like it that he left her. My mother converted, but they didn’t care.”

  Her parents only stayed married for a few years, long enough to have her and her sister. She went to Catholic school in Baton Rouge—“Because my parents didn’t want me going to school with boys. Their mistake. You would not believe what sluts they are in Catholic school.” She was sent to boarding school in Jordan, then she moved to Israel and studied to become an esthetician. Jenna was halfway through learning to cut hair and wax eyebrows when someone turned her in for being in the country illegally. She spent the night in jail and was put on a plane back to America the next day.

  She was convinced the informer was from her family, this extended, amorphous mass to which she constantly referred. Whatever she was or was becoming, she wanted it to be in contrast to this family that she always referred to in the aggregate. She hated them, but she couldn’t shake them: she was bound to their judgments, their gossip, the many fingers that prodded and shaped her life. She was only able to come back to Jerusalem after marrying Aden, who was her second cousin. Now, for the first time, she had legal status in Jerusalem. She carried her passport all the time, flipped it open to show me her visa.

  “Look,” she said, “I can even work!”

  She had not worked since she’d gotten married.

  Her husband Aden was tall and aloof. He wore sunglasses all the time so I never saw his eyes. I was starting to work on learning Arabic, but when I tried to speak to him in Arabic, he answered me in Hebrew. He was some kind of a middleman: he worked with Palestinian contractors and developers, Israeli lawyers and architects. Jenna was constantly going to the bank to deposit thick wads of cash for him.

  “That’s the great thing about Israel,” she said to me. “No taxes!”

  At first I didn’t understand what she meant, and when I finally figured it out, I felt like a fool. If you paid your taxes you were a freier, a “sucker.” The Yiddish word had entered into everyday use; it didn’t matter if you were Israeli or Palestinian, nobody wanted to be a freier.

  We were standing outside the daycare, waiting for the children to spill out of their classroom. Jenna introduced me to Yumiko and Katie. Yumiko was Japanese. She was tall and slender, looked at least a decade younger than her age, and seemed unhappy. She told me that she had studied translation in America, where she met her husband, Andrew.

  “I am not American,” she said definitively, “I absolutely do not feel American. I do not want my daughter to be American.”

  Her daughter Ana was the only little girl in Sam’s group. She had long black hair to her waist, her mother’s almond eyes, her father’s dimpled chin, and she ran the wild class of boys like a queen commanding a rowdy group of courtiers.

  Yumiko knew Katie from translation school, and it was a tremendous coincidence that they’d both ended up as embassy wives in Jerusalem. Back then Yumiko was learning English. Katie was studying Arabic.

  Yumiko said, “I remember this short, angry girl, always in a big rush, and always wearing a—what do you call those things—a keffiyeh around her neck.”

  Katie laughed. She was petite, blonde, ponytailed, and always in a uniform of khakis, collared shirts, pert sweaters. “Those were my political days.”

  The consulate women were having a spa party that day, somewhere up on French Hill. Neither Katie nor Yumiko was going. “I once made the mistake of going to a Tupperware party for the consulate women,” Katie said, “and I spent the whole time standing against the wall and drinking fruit punch. God, I got so drunk,” she said nostalgically, “never again.” Katie dragged an imaginary razor up the inner vein of her arm as she described it.

  Katie was an unusual presence at the embassy because she had grown up in the Middle East. Her father, a congregational minister, had worked in Saud
i Arabia, and then in Yemen. The oil companies had a secret agreement with the government: they were allowed to provide clergymen for each of the denominations represented among their employees, as long as they didn’t proselytize and kept a low profile.

  “Jews, too?” I said, and Katie said, “Well, no, obviously.”

  “What was it like in Saudi?” I said, and Katie said, “It was strange. The expats there are crazy. There’s something wrong with all of them or they wouldn’t be there. Either they can’t function back home, so they’ve fled, or they’ve been driven crazy by the money, or they’re drunks or addicts. Or all three. I had to wear an abaya during the day and I was driven around in a chauffeured, shuttered car. I wasn’t allowed to even drive, but at night we all drank in expat bars and went skinny-dipping in pools inside the compound.”

  After Katie left Yemen she taught English in Bethlehem for two years, before the second Intifada. “All those kids I taught, they’re all gone now. Moved to America, or Greece, or Jordan. Anyone who was educated, anyone who had a real choice, left. That’s what scares me the most. Of this generation, all the leaders, all the smart kids, and all the kids with potential—they’re gone and they’re not coming back. And who remains?”

  As a consulate wife Katie wasn’t allowed to travel to Bethlehem, and her old friends couldn’t get visas to visit her. She could only speak to them on the phone, as if she were still in Washington. She could have driven to Bethlehem in fifteen minutes.

  “Who would know if you went?” I asked, and she said, “Spies are everywhere. I mean, my husband could lose his job.”

  “Age tames us all,” she said. “It’s time—the kids must be out. We’d better check on them.”

  Katie and Yumiko told me that the spouses of diplomats were not allowed into the West Bank. They weren’t supposed to go to the market: also, on buses, to city fairs, into certain parts of town. They couldn’t go to public events—they were banned from all crowded spaces—they couldn’t walk around at night, they couldn’t go to political demonstrations or express opinions that might hurt the reputation of the embassy. They couldn’t work. They could park anywhere they wanted to, and they did, using the immunity of their diplomatic stickers to roll their giant SUVs into handicapped spots and onto sidewalks, having awkwardly navigated the old donkey roads of Jerusalem. They had fundraisers and social events, worked out at the gym, filled the hours in between by watching their children. The domestic bookends of the day were dropping off the children and putting them to bed. Everything else was variations on a theme: what to buy for supper, when to work out, where to have coffee while the children were in school, where to go in the early afternoon when class finished.