Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (finding audrey .TXT) 📗

our families.” He seemed genuinely curious about my life in Sydney, and as I sat down to reply, I found my resolution to shed him as a correspondent weakening.

“Is there Arabs in Australia? And did you know some of them?” he asked. You bet, I wrote, proudly telling him about my girlfriends. As I wrote about making stuffed vine leaves at Zita’s house, the spicy smells of her mother’s kitchen flooded back to me. I’d enjoyed being part of her boisterous extended family and the female food-assembly line of aunt, grandmother, mother and sisters. I loved it when her grandmother, who spoke little English, covered my hands with her work-worn, callused ones, showing me how to shape the rice and tuck the leaves, all the time burbling encouragement in gentle Levantine Arabic. I wrote of their tiny but productive garden, its neatly staked tomato plants and grape arbor groaning with fruit. Before I knew it, I’d filled several pages myself.

Eventually, the pen-pal service sent me another name. The tiny slip read: E boy 7/54, meaning an English-speaking male whose July birthday in 1954 made him an ideal fourteen months older than I. But the really good news came on the next line, with the surname. Cohen!

Even I, who a decade later would fall in love with a man named Horwitz without realizing he was Jewish, recognized Cohen as an unmistakably Jewish name. But then I knew why I recognized it, and my heart sank. Somewhere in my obsessive reading, I’d discovered that the cohains—the priestly class of ancient Israel—weren’t allowed to marry converts. My plan had gone awry again.

Within a couple of pale mauve aerograms, it became clear that my correspondent’s priestly status wasn’t the only impediment to a romance. Cohen was a Jew; Israeli-born, he was even a genuine sabra. But he was also dull. A dull Israeli, just like an Arab Israeli, was a possibility that hadn’t occurred to me.

His brief letters were full of football, basketball and the beach—the same dreary subjects that obsessed the Aussie youths to whom I wouldn’t give the time of day. All he knew about Sydney was that the Israeli soccer team had recently played there, and all he wanted to know about me was whether I’d seen the game. Actually, if I’d known, I might well have persuaded my father to take me, in the hope of meeting some Jews. But I still hated sports. I resented the way the Australian sports obsession sapped attention from intellectual achievement. I associated sports with the beer-puking louts who spilled out of the local pub after the games finished on Saturdays, making the footpath into a gantlet to be run by any women who wanted to pass.

It proved difficult to engage Cohen on anything else. He was almost sixteen—just two years from compulsory army service, but my questions on his feelings about this, the kind of unit he would apply for, his vision of life afterward, were lost either in his unwillingness to discuss big issues or his inability to frame adequate responses in his limited English.

A year later, I was surprised to find myself writing a Christmas card to Mishal. But when I thought of sending Cohen a Hanukkah wish, I realized it had been months since we’d last corresponded.

6

French Letters

I was four when I first heard French.

My mother and I were at the railway station on a chilly winter’s day. She had bundled me up in red tights and a matching red corduroy hood that tied in a bow under my chin. I remember a handsome woman leaning down to me and smiling, saying something I didn’t understand. She was complimenting me on my beautiful chapeau. My mother latched onto the word and carried it home with us. In the garden, she devised a game named Shop de Chapeau. A large crimson leaf was a flamboyant Easter bonnet, a small sepia and gold one a sophisticated pillbox hat. Packed in old shoeboxes and stacked on tree-branch shelves, they became the stock of the store’s proprietress, Mademoiselle Poohbarre.

“But Madame looks très chic in ze green beret!”

“No, I think I prefer something with a brim.”

“Well, in that case, may I show Madame the maroon felt?” I presented my mother with a shoe box containing a fallen camphor-laurel leaf. “Oh là là! Magnifique, non?”

My mother had never had a chance to learn French, but she loved the sound of the language. We augmented our vocabulary from the television: Maurice Chevalier midday movies, Morticia and her besotted husband Gomez in “The Addams Family” and Pepe-le-Pew, the amorous French skunk in the Warner Brothers cartoons.

I longed to learn French before I knew where France was. I yearned for high school, when foreign-language classes would begin. I was sure that acquiring another language would allow me to break the code of all those older and better cultures that I imagined elsewhere.

If I had opened my ears, I might have realized that I could have learned any number of languages just by listening to the neighbors.

While I was so busy writing away in search of foreigners, the world was arriving on my street. Every time a FOR SALE sign sprouted in a front yard, my mother’s friends—Edna and the other Irish Catholic “old-timers”—would gather to gossip over cups of tea and wonder apprehensively whether the place would be bought by “New Australians.” Almost always, it was. Soon we were surrounded: we had a Turk over the back fence, Serbs next door, Greeks across the road, Italians, Russians, Lebanese and Chinese in the next block.

I was too young to give the changes much thought. But to people of Edna’s generation the sudden diversity was shocking in a country built on racist exclusion. Migrants were supposed to be British, or Europeans who could pass for British. Australia feared Jews, blacks and especially the “Yellow Peril” from nearby Asia. For years, the nation’s best weekly magazine, the Bulletin, had carried the slogan “Australia for