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  Next, she wrote the same three letters, joined in a single word:

  كَتَبَ

  “Kataba,” she said. “You know this verb: to write, or, technically, he wrote, the simple past-tense verb. This verb is the trunk of the tree.”

  From this trunk, she wrote in related words, perched on lines like branches—kitab (كِتاب), book; maktab (مَكْتَب), desk or office—and proceeded to explain how these branch words followed set patterns. In the word maktab, for instance, the letter meem and the short vowels—these together indicate that it is a so-called noun of place, in this case, the place-where-you-write.

  “This way, the word’s very shape and rhythm give you a clue to its meaning,” our professor said. “If you know the root verb and you recognize the pattern in the word, you can guess what it means.”

  She prodded us for other nouns of place from our limited vocabulary. A matbakh is a kitchen, we deduced, from the verb tabakha, to cook; a majlis, a living room, from jalasa, to sit; a masjid, mosque, from sajada, to worship. Then one of the two graduate students, a glum pair who always sat in the back row, arms folded, spoke up: “Oh! Mabal. Like for hermaphrodites.”

  “That’s right,” our professor said. “From the root ba-waw-lam, which gives the verb bala, to urinate.” She was normally not one for digressions or jokes, but she paused to explain: a mabal was an important term in medieval Islamic law, a field deeply concerned with gender. Whether you were a man or a woman determined what you inherited, where you prayed, how your corpse was washed before burial. The occasional hermaphrodite presented a quandary, and the mabal—the place-where-the-pee-comes-out—was the answer, jurists decided. If the mabal resembled a man’s, then the subject would be treated like a man; if a woman’s, a woman. Our professor turned back to the board, as though we had not briefly dipped into something utterly bizarre.

  Next she wrote, continuing with the verb kataba:

  كاتِب

  “Katib, with the long vowel alif, and then a short i, is the pattern for the active participle: ‘I am writing.’ Grammatically, it’s an adjective, so it can be feminine or masculine,” she explained, “but it can often take the meaning of a noun. So, not just is-doing, but one-who-is-doing—in this case, one-who-is-writing. By which I mean a writer.”

  Tik-tik-tik went our professor’s chalk, and there was another word:

  مَكْتوب

  “Maktoob, the past participle, with a long vowel oo. ‘Written,’ an adjective. You also know, for instance, matbookh, cooked.” She paused for a moment. “But, again, you can also look at maktoob as a noun, the written-thing, by which I mean fate.” Here she allowed herself a small, wry smile.

  I wrote the word maktoob and circled it. With three consonants and a few chalk marks, our professor had taken a series of leaps, each one farther than the last—from a simple, tangible book all the way to the abstract notion of destiny.

  Next, our professor passed around copies of a table with rows numbered I to XV. These were the verb forms in Arabic, fifteen ways that three-letter roots could be transformed into new, even more complex meanings. Form I was what we had learned so far: tabakha (to cook, طَبَخَ), say, and trusty kataba (to write, كَتَبَ), with a short vowel on each of the three root consonants. Form II had the doubling mark in the middle and granted transitive or causative properties: kattaba (كَتَّبَ), to make someone write something.

  On we went through the chart, tweaking the vowels and consonants and producing meanings intensive, reflexive, passive, and more. “Although,” our professor granted, “not every three-letter root produces every form—not even close. And Form IX is only for defects and colors. Oh, and XI to XV are pretty antiquated, so you won’t see them very often.” I appreciated her candor so early on; in my fourth-year French class a few weeks earlier, I had been blindsided by a bunch of rare literary subjunctives, long after I thought my verb work was done.

  The chart was proof of Arabic’s uniquely elegant productivity. German builds ungainly compound words, and English tacks on Latin and Greek suffixes, such as “inter–” and “–ology.” Arabic has two verb forms where the “inter–” is built right in. Takataba (تَكاتَبَ), Form VI, we had just learned, means to write to each other.

  Walking out of class that day, I clutched the verb chart to my chest. An image bloomed in my head: kataba in the center and its related words clustered close or far, tethered with a strong silken thread. No, that metaphor was too easily tangled. It was a tree, as our professor had said. Or a chugging word factory, reshaping raw materials into widgets both concrete and abstract. Or perhaps it was a solar system, each root a sun, orbited by planets and their moons—which made Arabic a whole universe, really.

  That idea was overwhelming, so I pushed it away and looked again at the verb chart, with its orderly rows. It was a lot to memorize, but it was a key to the door I had been shown on the first day of class.

  The root system opened up the world of Arabic dictionaries, whole storehouses of words that are alphabetized not by first letter necessarily, but by the root of a word. Don’t look for maktab (desk) under the letter meem, but under kaf-ta-ba, where you’ll find it listed with all the other products of that root: kataba (to write), katib (writer), and so on. My first was Hans Wehr’s Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. Hans (we were quickly on a first-name basis) accompanied me everywhere. Its grass-green cover rapidly creased, and the edges of the Bible-thin pages turned gray from flipping.

  Hans lends itself to idle browsing. Looking up, say, ra-seen-lam, a common root, I could discover that the main verb, rasila, means “to be long and flowing (hair),” yet branches out into such words as rasool (messenger or apostle), risala (letter), tarassul (a verbal noun from the Form V verb, to mean the art of letter writing), and mustarsil (an active participle from the Form VIII verb, meaning flowing; also, affable). Faced with such a web of meanings, I would make a game of linking them all in a story: one day, a lush-locked apostle began a friendly letter to his pen pal . . .

  Hans seemed to contain everything strange and wonderful about Arabic. I was thrilled to discover that there is a verb, qarfasa, “to squat on the ground (with thighs against the stomach and arms enfolding the legs),” and that fallaka, “to have round breasts,” is related to falak, “celestial sphere.” But the sheer profusion of delightful words became a deterrent to actually learning them. Every time I considered making a flashcard, I would think, Is this word more important than any other? Each one seemed both essential and hopelessly weird.

  In graduate school, I made the acquaintance of another, even more distracting dictionary, the one everyone called Lane. This is the eight-volume Arabic-English Lexicon, written in the late nineteenth century by one Edward William Lane, a British Orientalist who gadded about Cairo dressed as a Turk. His compendium and translation of more than a hundred medieval dictionaries is an admirable piece of scholarship, but it trails off two-thirds of the way through the alphabet, in the letter qaf. A fitting end, as that delicate cough of a letter was, in this case, the point where Lane himself coughed his last and died, after thirty-four years of labor.

  A library date with Lane could start with a simple question: why does beit mean both a house and a verse of poetry? Lane’s sources would ramble over a page and a half, bickering across the centuries. A beit is a goat-hair tent, one source attested. Not at all, retorted the next—the desert Arabs did not have goats with hair long enough to weave. A beit is a tent with at least two poles, some agreed. A buyeit is a miniature tent; only “the vulgar” use buweit as the diminutive. A beit is a house of worship, sometimes, and a beit al-ma’ (house of water) is a privy. Just when I thought I had made sense of all of those images, I would go to the next column: a beit is a grave, a family, even a wife. Only after a page or so would Lane offer anything approaching an answer to my question. As a line of poetry, a beit is part of a larger metaphor: a g
ood verse has a strong internal structure, as a tent does.

  I treasured a third dictionary too, one I bought after my formative first summer in Cairo. This book’s full title was A Dictionary of Modern Egyptian Arabic, but I came to think of it as my Badawi, after one of the authors. As my Arabic education progressed and I delved into ever older Fusha texts, I would often take a break with Badawi to remind myself of the living language, the bantering Ammiya I had encountered in Cairo.

  The lexicon bursts with such color and life that I imagined this Dr. Badawi had collected each and every example in person. In a tiny living room, a woman lamented, “’Umru goozi ma-warraani f-yoom riiq hilw”—My husband has never spoken to me kindly in his life—and Dr. Badawi cocked his head with empathy. On the banks of the Nile, Dr. Badawi scribbled in his notebook as a dripping-wet man complained, “Ghiri’t wa-ma-hadd-ish ghasni”—I was drowning and no one came to my aid. Tell me about it, I would think as I returned the book to the shelf and dove back into my Fusha homework.

  In the spring of my second year in graduate school, I consulted Badawi more and more frequently, because I had finally been accepted to an intensive, high-level Arabic program in Cairo. And whereas Hans Wehr and Edward William Lane were both long dead, Dr. Badawi was very much alive, and I would meet him soon, because he was the Cairo program’s director.

  When he welcomed us students on a 90-degree day in June, he looked as poised and thoughtful as I had always imagined, white hair brushed back, in a crisp oxford shirt and a camel-brown jacket. He had once been in our shoes, he assured us. At graduate school in London, he had studied for months with no progress; then, one day on a bus, the conversation across the aisle had rung through his mind as clear as a bell. “The penny dropped,” he said, switching into English to savor the idiom. Decades later, his face still glowed as he recalled this first flash of enlightenment.

  Dr. Badawi concluded his speech with a few language-learning tips. The most important thing, he told us, was not to be discouraged if we didn’t understand something. We shouldn’t immediately run for our dictionaries; we should maintain forward momentum. “Just make something up!” he said, his eyes sparkling.

  I had spent the previous two years of graduate school poking around in ever dustier corners of the Arabic word factory, in long-disused word warehouses. The language I had initially thought so elegant and efficient had piled up to form unstable stacks of grammatical arcana, around which I could only tiptoe. In light of this, Dr. Badawi’s freewheeling advice sounded impossible to implement. Still, I tucked it away for future use.

  A Prophecy

  Making the evaluator laugh during my placement exam worked better than I could have dreamed. When I checked the class rolls, I found I had been placed in the highest level. The teacher was a tall, thin man with sad eyes who stooped by the whiteboard. He welcomed us and said dolefully, “I would like to discuss the social problems of the youth of Egypt in this new revolutionary era.” He passed out a sheet of vocabulary words that my fellow students—a Belgian woman with architectural eyeglasses and a redheaded American college student—lunged at eagerly.

  I perused the list with less enthusiasm: tafahum (consensus), tamarrud (rebellion), ghawgha’iyah (demagoguery). These dreary, abstract words made my heart sink. The teacher pressed play on a video clip, an excerpt from a policy-oriented talk show. My stomach began to hurt.

  In Cairo in late 1997, about halfway through my yearlong advanced Arabic program with Dr. Badawi, I came to two grim conclusions. Together they made it clear that I had taken a wrong turn in graduate school, and I needed out. The first moment of understanding came from my writing teacher. Early in the semester, she told me, “You have such a big vocabulary!” I had been larding my compositions with juicy finds from the pages of Hans Wehr, and it felt good to have my hard work recognized. I redoubled my efforts. Near the end of the term, she asked, her eyes clouded with concern, “Why are you still using all these strange words?”

  Oh. My big vocabulary was a bad thing? It was obvious in hindsight: dictionary-mad, I had made a simple What I Did This Weekend essay into one in which I “strode forth” from my apartment, to “orate” to my friends while we “imbibed” strong black tea.

  The second epiphany came during my spoken Fusha class. This oxymoronic exercise, talking the way no one ever talked, was my least favorite class. But I did like listening to one fellow student who had a talent—rare among us, and even among native Arabic speakers—to declaim fluidly in the classical Fusha language. One morning, he sat up straight and gestured grandly: “Verily, I ascended to the bus this day, and it was chaos with respect to people . . .” It was his standard joke, but it killed every time: a mundane, modern story in the most antique words. He spoke with full case endings, and his speech sounded beautifully complete. I could almost see the words falling into their assigned grammatical slots, like linguistic Tetris blocks.

  Our teacher called us to order. “Let us now address the matter of the article of yesterday,” he said. The reading was yet another editorial about how the Arabs had given the world algebra, then fallen into their current state of misery. “What, in your respected opinions, is the problem with the Arab world in this modern era?”

  Everyone else clamored to answer. I sat back and stared out the window. My head hurt and my stomach churned; I had spent much of the semester sick, swamped with work, and lonely. The problem wasn’t Arabic—I still loved its eccentricities and intricacies and all its lovely words. But at this advanced level, no one was using it to say anything I cared about. I should be outside, I thought, with the traffic, the crowds, the arguments and gossip, the greetings and jokes.

  The tall, thin teacher stooped to press the pause button on the video clip. He turned to the class for comments on the policy talk show, and the Belgian woman raised her hand. Her research, she said as she pushed her architectural glasses up her nose, was in child development in the Arab world, and she agreed with the talk show’s guest. The cause of the social problems of Egypt, so prevalent among the youth of today, was the education system.

  This Belgian woman had an impressive ability to repeat back whole sentences from what we had watched. My listening comprehension had never been strong—all those years sitting alone reading dictionaries hadn’t helped—and it had been the first skill to go when I gave up my studies.

  Perhaps a lack of creative thinking, the Belgian woman concluded, could lead to ghawgha’iyah, demagoguery. She didn’t even have to look down at her vocabulary list as she said it.

  After I knew I would leave graduate school, the rest of my time in Cairo was easier. To get outside more, to use Arabic in the street rather than in my dismal spoken Fusha class, I accepted any and every social invitation. Happy hour at the Australian consulate. French fries and chicken livers at the twenty-four-hour rooftop bar. An accidental date with an earnest Egyptian writer, who took me to the British pub at the Marriott and told me that his fiancée was a lesbian, then read me a short erotic poem.

  I met other, less lascivious Egyptians too. They were part of the larger American University circle, and we usually spoke English. But after my isolated first semester, talking to any Egyptian in any language was an education—and a reminder of why I’d wanted to come back to this city. People loved to talk. My landlord, a sad-eyed hydrologist, dropped by periodically to scare my roommates and me with Nile pollution statistics. Hassan, a cheerful, round-faced man with a wheezy laugh, had studied dentistry in the Soviet Union but switched to archaeology. He was a guide for Russian tourists and regaled us with stories of their strange behavior, such as their propensity for wearing hot pants when touring ancient ruins. Hassan’s friend Saad, with his slightly crossed eyes and wicked grin, provided an endless stream of jokes.

  In mid-May, a few weeks before the end of the school year, Hassan had a party at his apartment. After dinner, we guests settled outside on the terrace to watch the sunset; the ca
ll to prayer drifted across the rooftops, signaling the ease of evening. As the sky darkened and the neighbor’s pigeons whirled back home to roost, the conversation shifted into Arabic. At first I was tense, worried I would miss a detail. I took a swig of my beer and a few sips from the joint that was making its way around. (In Ammiya, one doesn’t “smoke” a cigarette, a joint, or a sheesha pipe; one “drinks” it.)

  Saad, reclining like a pasha on a cushion-strewn bench, played the role of social director. As a desert guide, he was an expert in building a good haflit samar, a party around a campfire, and he goaded others into telling stories and jokes. In the run-up to the punchlines, I remembered Dr. Badawi’s advice: just make something up. If I missed something, I could always spin a joke in my own head.

  My anxiety dissipated, and some door in my brain opened. Through it, words passed easily without my having to analyze each and every one. After about fifteen minutes, I realized I wasn’t actually making anything up. Saad’s face glowed above a flared match, and I perfectly understood his joke about Egyptians stealing Hosni Mubarak’s watch. The rest of the night went by in a pleasant blur—I even threw in a few witticisms of my own. In that balmy night, high above the roaring city, I felt, for the first time, completely at ease in Arabic and in Cairo. Not only was I finally using the language as intended, as a social connector, but we were, I grandly mused, carrying on the long and noble rhetorical tradition Arabic had cultivated since it was born in the desert so many centuries before. Only in our case, instead of trading poems, we were swapping yo’ mama jokes and wisecracks about Egyptian rednecks.

  A week before my departure, some fellow students threw a party in their sprawling colonial-era apartment, fueled by the miscellaneous liqueurs we had collected from the duty-free shop. The Egyptian poet who’d taken me to the British pub attended, and at a hazy point late in the evening, after we had to turn down the music but before the cops came, he stripped off all his clothes except his socks and danced alone under the chandeliers.