Saturday Aramaic

Name: Saturday Aramaic: One Last Term, a School Portable, a Chalkboard Alphabet and the Father Who Sat in His Truck
Author: V. Ashtapad

One Last Term, a School Portable, a Chalkboard Alphabet and the Father Who Sat in His Truck

by V. Ashtapad

Foreword

This is a work of fiction. Turlock, California, is home to one of the largest Assyrian communities in the United States, and its Saturday language classes, kada bread and khigga line dances are real and much loved. The Saturday class, the community hall and everyone in this book are invented.

For every teacher who stayed after class.

Lesson One: Alap

The heater in Portable Four takes eleven minutes to stop smelling of burned dust, and Shamiram Odisho knows this because she has been switching it on at nine o'clock on Saturday mornings since the school district put the portable behind the playground in nineteen ninety-eight.

She switches it on. She stands with her coat still buttoned while it ticks and hums and breathes out its first gray breath. The portable is a long beige box on cinderblocks with a ramp up to the door and a window at each end, and in January, at this hour, the windows are fogged from the inside and the outside both. On the outside it is the Valley fog, the tule fog, thick and white and so still that the playground's chain-link fence is only a rumor ten feet away. On the inside it is the breath of the building itself, waking up.

The chalkboard runs the length of the front wall. It is a real chalkboard, green, slate under the paint, which is why she fought for this portable and not the new ones with the white boards and the pens that squeak and smell of solvent. Above the chalkboard, painted on a strip of plywood that her husband cut and sanded and hung for her the first year, are the twenty-two letters.

She painted them herself, in white, in the spring of nineteen eighty-five, in their garage on Lander Avenue, with a brush from the hardware store and a page torn from her own grandmother's primer propped against a coffee can. They go from right to left, as the letters do, so that a child who reads the strip correctly starts at the end nearest the door and walks with his eyes toward the window. They are not like English letters. They do not stand up separately like fence posts. They sit on a line, most of them, and lean into each other, and some of them have tails that hang below the line and some of them have little hooks above it, and a few look so alike that only a dot tells them apart. Alap, the first, is a slanted stroke with a foot, like a person leaning into the wind. Taw, the last, down at the window end, is a loop with a tail.

Forty-one years of children have looked up at that strip. Some of them have children of their own in this class now. Two of them have grandchildren.

She takes off her coat. The heater has stopped smelling of dust. It is eleven minutes past nine, and she has twenty-nine minutes until the first car comes, and on her desk is a sheet of yellow paper with a line drawn down the middle and, at the top, in her square schoolteacher's printing: FALL TERM TEACHER. SIGN HERE.

It has been on the bulletin board at the community hall since October. Nobody has signed it.

---

They come in the way they always come in: the little ones first, because their parents are the most anxious, then the middle ones, then the two big boys, Elias and Ninos, who are twelve and eleven and arrive at nine-forty-five exactly so that nobody can say they were early.

Fourteen children this term. She knows all their grandparents. She knows which ones have a grandmother at home who speaks only Assyrian and which ones have a grandmother at home who speaks only English and is sorry about it. She knows that Atra, who is seven, can say the whole alphabet but only if she is allowed to sing it, and that David, who is ten, can read better than anyone and pretends he cannot so that Elias will not tease him. She knows that Ramina Yonan, who is nine and has her hair in two braids so tight they make her eyebrows go up, comes every week with her little brother Eddie and a lunch box with a picture of a horse on it, and that their father drives them and does not come in.

He never comes in. He parks his white work truck at the far end of the lot, by the dumpsters, with the engine running for the heater, and sits in it for two and a half hours with his phone, and at twelve-fifteen he flashes his lights once and the children run out.

She has seen him every Saturday since September. She knows who he is. She has not said so.

---

"Shlama," she says, and fourteen voices say it back, some loudly, some into their collars.

"Before we start." She stands at the front with her hands folded. She is a short woman, shorter every year, in a brown cardigan with the elbows patched, and her hair is white and cut short because she stopped having the patience for it the year her husband died. Her knee hurts. She does not show it. "I have something to tell you, and then we will do alap, because some of you have forgotten alap over Christmas, and alap is the door. You cannot come in the house without the door."

"We know," says Elias, from the back.

"Elias knows." She nods at him gravely. "Good. Elias will show us alap in a minute. First." She looks at all of them. "This is my last term. In June, I am stopping. I am seventy-six years old, and my knees are older, and I have taught this class for forty-one years. I am going to sit in my garden and watch my roses get eaten by gophers."

Silence. Then Atra, from the front row, in a small appalled voice: "Who's going to teach us?"

Shamiram looks at the yellow sheet on her desk.

"That," she says, "is a very good question."

---

At twelve-fifteen the truck's lights flash. The children run. Ramina stops at the door and turns back and says, "Rabi, are you really stopping?" using the word for teacher that all of them use, that Shamiram's own teachers had made her use in a schoolroom in another country sixty-six years ago.

"I am really stopping."

Ramina considers this. Then she says, "My dad says nobody will do it," and runs out down the ramp after her brother.

Shamiram stands in the doorway of the portable and watches the girl run across the wet asphalt to the white truck. The fog is lifting. She can see the fence now, and past the fence the road, and past the road the first rows of an almond orchard, bare black trees in straight lines going away into the white, every trunk painted white at the base against the sun, so that the orchard looks like a field of people in white socks.

She has a box of books in the trunk of her car that needs to go to the hall. It is heavy. Her knee would rather not.

She goes down the ramp with her cane, which she uses for ramps and nothing else, and across the lot to the white truck, and knocks on the driver's window.

The window comes down. He is a big man, wide in the shoulders, in a canvas jacket with the name of an irrigation company on it and a knit cap pulled low, and he has a short black beard going gray at the chin and the eyes of a boy she remembers.

"Mr. Yonan," she says. "I have a box of books in my car. Would you carry it to the hall for me? It's on your way."

He looks at her for a long moment. In the back seat, Ramina is very carefully not listening.

"Sure," he says. "Yes, Rabi. Of course."

He gets out. He carries the box. He does not say anything else, and neither does she, and when he has put it in the back of his truck and closed the tailgate, he stands there with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the portable over her shoulder.

"I didn't think you'd remember me," he says.

"Benyamin Yonan," she says. "Third row. By the window. You left in the middle of the dalat."

Next chapter

Lesson Two: Bet

Bet is a house. That is how she has always taught it. The letter is a shape like a house seen from the side, a roof and a floor and an open door, and the open side faces the way you read, toward the next letter, because a house should always be ready for a guest.

"That's not in the book," says David, who has read ahead.

"No," she agrees. "It's in me. Today, bet."

The word is bet, too. The word for house. She writes it on the board, the two letters joined, and the little ones copy it into their notebooks with their tongues out, and the middle ones draw houses around it, because she has told them to, and the big boys draw houses with satellite dishes and swimming pools and a car in the driveway and argue about the car.

It is the seventeenth of January. The fog has not come today. Instead there is a cold sharp sun and a sky so clear that from the portable's door she can see, far to the east over the orchards, the white line of the mountains, which in this Valley you see perhaps twenty mornings a year. She stood in the doorway for a full minute when she arrived, looking at them.

At nine-fifty, Benyamin Yonan comes up the ramp with his two children, late, and stops in the doorway.

"Sorry," he says. "Sorry, Rabi. The gate at the orchard on Bradbury was locked and I had to—" He stops. He is looking at the board.

"Come in," she says. "Close the door. You are letting the heat out to the gophers."

The children go to their seats. He stays in the doorway.

"Mr. Yonan," she says. "I need to ask you a favor."

---

The favor is this, and it is true, which is why she is able to ask it with a straight face: the school district has a rule that any group using its buildings on weekends must have two adults present. For twenty-eight years the second adult was her husband, Ashur, who sat at the back of the portable on a child's chair with his knees up near his chin, reading the newspaper and correcting her spelling under his breath. Since he died, it has been whichever parent she can catch at the door. This term it has been nobody, because every parent she catches at the door suddenly remembers a dentist appointment, and she has been breaking the rule since September and waiting for someone to notice.

"I can't," he says. "I have to—"

"Sit in your truck," she says. "I know. You can sit in a chair instead. It is warmer, and there is coffee."

There is coffee. She brings it every week in a thermos the size of a fire extinguisher, Ashur's thermos, and drinks one cup of it and takes the rest home.

He looks at his daughter. Ramina is in the third row by the window. She is pretending to write bet in her notebook, and she is listening so hard that her braids are quivering.

"Okay," he says. "For today."

---

He sits at the back on a child's chair. It is the same chair, though he cannot know that. His knees come up nearly to his chin. He holds the coffee in both hands and looks at it, mostly, and sometimes out the window at the orchard, and sometimes, when he thinks she is not watching, at the board.

She teaches. She teaches the way she always teaches, which is with her whole body, walking up and down between the desks with the chalk in one hand and the pointer in the other, tapping the letters on the strip, making the children say the sounds after her, making the little ones stand up and be the letter bet with their arms, roof and floor and door. Atra is a very good bet. Eddie Yonan, who is six, is a bet with no dot inside and has to be told he is an empty house, and laughs so hard he falls over.

At the back, the big man on the child's chair laughs too, once, through his nose, and then stops.

She makes them read. One word each, from the board. Bet. Tara, the word for door. Bayta, the bigger word for house, home, the place you come back to. When she comes to the back row, Elias reads his word fast and loud to show it is beneath him, and Ninos reads his slowly to show it is not, and then there is no one left in the back row except Benyamin Yonan.

She does not ask him. She sees him see that she is not going to ask him. She walks back to the front.

---

At twelve-fifteen the children run, and he stays behind to stack chairs without being asked, and she lets him.

"You were in this room," she says. "This exact room. Do you remember?"

"I remember." He sets a chair on a desk. "It smelled the same. The heater."

"It always will. The district says it's harmless."

"The district says a lot of things." He stacks another chair. "I was eight. My dad brought me. I sat by the window and I was the worst one in the class."

"You were not the worst one."

"I was the worst one, Rabi. I could talk. My grandmother lived with us, I could talk better than any of them. But the letters." He lifts a chair and holds it. "I'd look at them and they'd move. The dots would move. Dalat and resh. They'd swap when I wasn't looking, top to bottom."

She knows this. She remembers it now, standing in the cold portable with the sun coming in low across the desks, a boy of nine or ten reading aloud with his finger on the page, slowly, slowly, getting it wrong, the others shifting in their seats. She remembers his father, a big quiet man who smelled of diesel, coming to pick him up and waiting in the doorway with his cap in his hands.

She does not remember the day he stopped coming. Forty-one years of children. They come, and some of them stay, and many of them stop, and she had told herself for most of those years that she could not keep them all.

"And now?" she says.

He puts the chair on the desk.

"Now I read the menu at the restaurant on Golden State and order what Ramina orders," he says, "so nobody can tell."

Next chapter

Lesson Three: Dots

The dots are where she loses them. She has known this for forty-one years and has never found a way around it, only through.

The letters are the bones. The dots are the breath. In the old writing, the writing her grandmother read, the vowels were not letters at all but little dots placed above and below the line, one dot or two, side by side or one on top of the other, sometimes a dot and a short stroke, each pattern a different sound. A child who has learned all twenty-two letters can look at a word with its dots and still not be able to say it, because the dots are small, and they float, and they do not seem to belong to anything. They are like flecks of pepper on a page. The children want to brush them off.

On the twenty-fourth of January she draws them on the board very large, each dot the size of a tennis ball, and she makes the little ones stand on chairs and hold paper plates over their heads and under their feet to be the dots, and they love this, and it does not help.

"Two dots on top, side by side," she says. "A. Like when the doctor says open your mouth. Ah."

"Ah," says the class.

"One dot on top, one underneath. Eh."

"Eh," says the class, and Elias says "Eh" in a way that is clearly a comment on the whole situation, and she lets it go.

Benyamin Yonan is at the back on his child's chair. It is the second week he has sat there. He came without being asked this time, at nine-thirty-five, and she did not say anything, and he did not say anything, and he took the coffee and sat.

This week she gives him a job. She gives him the box of chalk and asks him to go around the room and give each child a piece, and when the children go up to the board one by one to draw a word with its dots, he stands at the side of the board with the eraser and wipes it clean after each one.

It is a job for a child. He does it with great seriousness, the way big men do small jobs. And standing there at the side of the board, with the eraser in his hand and the children coming up one by one, he cannot help reading the words.

She watches him do it. She watches his lips move. Ramina draws bayta, house, with its dots, and he mouths it, slowly, before she has finished. David draws a longer word, a showing-off word, and Benyamin's lips stop halfway through and his forehead creases and he looks at the dots for a long time after David has sat down, before he erases it.

---

After, when the children have gone to the truck, he comes back up the ramp. He stands in the doorway with his cap in his hands, exactly the way his father did.

"That long word," he says. "The one David wrote."

"Malpana," she says. "Teacher. The one who teaches."

He nods. He looks at the board, which is clean.

"I couldn't get past the middle," he says. "The dots under the pe. I knew it was a word, I could feel it was a word I knew, I've heard it all my life. But I couldn't make it come out." He turns his cap around in his hands. "That's what it was like when I was nine. That's what it's still like. Ramina reads better than me. She's nine. She reads to me at night from the little book you gave her and I sit there going, yes, yes, very good, and I'm reading along with my finger under the table."

She says nothing for a moment.

"Come at nine," she says. "Next week. Half an hour before the children."

"Rabi—"

"I'm not asking you to teach. I'm asking you to come at nine. The heater takes eleven minutes. You can watch it."

He laughs. It surprises him, she can see; he did not mean to.

"Why?" he says.

It is the right question, and she has an answer ready, a sensible answer, about the two-adult rule and the chairs and the coffee. She does not give it.

"Because nobody has signed the sheet," she says. "And because you can talk better than any of them. And because I am seventy-six years old and I do not have time to find someone who can read and teach them to talk."

He stands in the doorway for a long time. Out in the lot, Ramina rolls down the truck's window and calls something, and he lifts one hand without turning around.

"I'm not going to teach your class," he says.

"I didn't ask you to."

"I'm just saying. So you know."

"I know." She picks up her thermos. "Nine o'clock."

Next chapter

Lesson Four: Counting

He comes at nine.

She is already there, because she has always been there by nine, and she sees his truck come into the lot through the fog, its headlights two blurred yellow moons, and park, not by the dumpsters this time but near the ramp. He sits in it for four minutes. She watches him through the portable's window. Then he gets out and comes up the ramp and knocks on the open door.

"The heater," he says.

"Nine more minutes."

He sits at the back on the child's chair, and she sits at her desk, and they watch it together. Neither of them speaks. The heater ticks and hums. The smell of burned dust fades. At eleven minutes past, she gets up and takes a piece of chalk and draws, on the chalkboard, at the left-hand end where the children cannot see it from the door, a single slanted stroke with a foot.

"Alap," she says. "Draw it."

---

That is the first morning. The lesson that follows is counting.

Numbers are the easy part, the part where she wins them back after the dots. She has always put counting in the fourth week for that reason. Kha, one. Treh, two. Every child in the room knows these already from their grandmothers, from card games and recipes and the counting-out rhymes Assyrian grandmothers have been using to choose who is "it" since before anyone had a word for "it." Shamiram makes them count the desks, and the windows, and the letters on the strip, and the almond trees they can see from the window, which is impossible, and they try anyway, shouting, until the fog closes over the orchard and there is nothing left to count but fog.

Then she makes them count their families.

Each child stands and counts the people in their house, in Assyrian, on their fingers. Atra has five. David has seven, including a great-grandmother who is ninety-four and still makes her own yogurt. Elias, who is too cool to count, counts anyway, and has three, and sits down very fast, and nobody says anything, because they all know about his father.

Ramina stands. She counts her mother and her father and her brother and herself, four, and then her Nana, who lives two streets over but is at their house every day, five, and then she stops and looks at the back of the room.

"And my dad's teacher," she says. "Because she's at our house in the night when he does his homework."

The whole class turns to look at Benyamin Yonan on the child's chair. He has gone a deep red up to the edge of his knit cap.

"Ramina," he says.

"What? You said it's like she's in the kitchen."

Shamiram does not laugh. It costs her something. She says, "Thank you, Ramina. That is six," and moves on to Ninos, and does not look at the back of the room again until twelve.

---

The committee meets at one o'clock at the hall on Golden State Boulevard, in the small room behind the kitchen where the walls are covered with photographs of picnics. There are five of them on the committee and three come: Khamis Daniel, who is the chair and has been the chair since the late nineties and is a retired pharmacist with a voice like a radio announcer's; his wife Juliet, who keeps the minutes in a spiral notebook; and Shamiram.

"We will find someone," says Khamis. He has been saying this since October.

"Who?"

"Dr. Youkhana. At the university. She has a doctorate in the language. She is perfect."

"She said no in November."

"She said she was busy in November. That's different from no. I'll ask her again."

"Khamis."

"Shamiram." He spreads his hands on the table. He has long, clean pharmacist's hands. "We are a hall of four hundred families. Somebody will do it. Somebody always does."

"For forty-one years," says Shamiram, "somebody has been me."

Juliet stops writing.

Dr. Ninva Youkhana comes in at one-thirty, apologetic, in a long camel coat, with her car keys in her hand because she cannot stay. She is thirty-eight and has two small boys and teaches linguistics at the university on the other side of town and has written a book about the verbs of their language that Shamiram has read twice and admired and not entirely understood. She sits on the edge of a folding chair.

"I can't," she says. "I'm so sorry, Rabi. I want to. I have tenure review in the fall and the boys and my mother-in-law is moving in. I can't do Saturdays. I can help. I can make materials, I can get my students to scan things. But I can't stand in that room every week." She looks at Shamiram with a kind of pleading. "Nobody can do what you do."

"That," says Shamiram, "is the problem."

---

She drives home in the fog at three, slowly, with her headlights low, along the road between the orchards. The trees come out of the white one by one beside the car, black and bare, and go back into it.

At home on Lander Avenue, she makes tea and sits at the kitchen table where she and Ashur sat for forty-two years. His photograph is on the windowsill, by the African violets: a big bald smiling man in a short-sleeved shirt, standing in their own orchard on the edge of town the year before they sold it, his hand on the trunk of a tree.

"Benyamin Yonan," she tells him. "You remember. Diesel Yonan's boy. The one with the dots."

The photograph smiles at her.

"He drew alap this morning," she says. "He drew it like a man signing a check he can't cover. But he drew it."

Next chapter

Lesson Five: Kada

Kada is not a letter. She has always taught it anyway.

It is the seventh of February, the first Saturday of the month, and on the first Saturday of every February for forty-one years she has brought kada to the class, because there is no word in the language that a child learns with more pleasure than a word you can eat. This year she has not baked it alone. This year, at six o'clock on Friday evening, there was a knock at her kitchen door, and when she opened it, there was a woman of seventy standing on her step with a flour sack under one arm and a rolling pin under the other.

"Atorina Yonan," said the woman. "Benyamin's mother. He said you would be baking. He said you have a bad knee." She looked Shamiram up and down. "I have a bad hip. Between us we have one good leg. Let me in."

They baked until eleven.

Kada is a round bread, or a round pastry, depending on whose grandmother you ask, as big as a dessert plate, golden, glazed with egg, and pressed all over its top with a pattern from a carved wooden stamp or the tines of a fork or, in Atorina's case, the bottom of an old perforated tea strainer that had belonged to her own mother. Inside it is a filling, a crumbly sweet paste of flour toasted in butter until it smells of nuts, with sugar, a little cardamom. You make the dough with yeast and milk and butter and you let it rise in a warm place, which in Shamiram's house in February is on top of the refrigerator, and you roll out a round, put the filling in the middle, fold the edges over it, flatten it gently, stamp the top. You bake it until it is the color of a good violin.

Atorina did not measure anything. She put her hands in the flour up to the wrists and said "Enough" or "More" and was always right. Shamiram, who measured everything, watched her and felt, for the first time in years, like a pupil.

"He was a good boy," Atorina said, at ten o'clock, with flour on her chin. "My Benny. He was a quiet good boy. He could fix anything. Seven years old, he took apart his father's irrigation timer and put it back together better. But the reading." She shook her head. "His father didn't read either. His father said, the language is for talking. For your grandmother. The letters are for the old men at the hall. You're American, you have English letters. Why do you need the old ones." She pressed the strainer into the top of a kada, firmly, and lifted it, and there was a ring of tiny circles like a flower. "I didn't argue. I should have argued."

"You argue now," said Shamiram.

"Now I'm old. Old women can argue with anyone."

---

They bring nineteen kada to the portable, one for each child and one for Benyamin and one for Shamiram and one for the second adult, which is Atorina, who has decided that she is coming, and two extra because Atorina says you always make two extra in case of a guest. They are in two big baskets covered with dish towels, and when Shamiram takes the towels off, the smell fills the portable and goes out the door and down the ramp, and two mothers who were about to drive away get out of their cars and come back.

The lesson is the bread. Bread words, kitchen words, the words for flour and butter and oven and hot. Lakhma, bread, the word for all bread, the word that a grandmother says when she puts it on the table. Atorina stands at the front with Shamiram and tells the children how her own grandmother baked bread in a clay oven in the ground, in a village whose name she says and the children try to repeat, slapping the dough against the hot wall of the oven with a cushion, and how the bread came out with blisters on one side and the shape of the cushion on the other. The children listen with their mouths open. They are eating kada while they listen, which helps.

Benyamin sits at the back. He came at nine again, for the second week, and drew alap and bet and gamal and dalat at the left end of the board while the heater ticked, and Shamiram corrected his dalat twice, because he kept putting the dot on top where resh has it, and he swore under his breath, in English, and then apologized, in Assyrian.

Now he sits with his kada on a paper towel on his knee and watches his mother teach.

"Benny," says Atorina suddenly, from the front. "Come. Tell them the word for the stamp."

He does not move.

"He knows it," Atorina tells the class. "He knew it when he was three. He used to steal my stamp and stamp everything, the table, the cat."

The children laugh. Ramina laughs loudest and then looks guilty about it.

Benyamin stands up. He walks to the front. He is very large in the small room, among the small desks, and he stands next to his mother and his old teacher and looks down at fourteen children eating kada, and Shamiram sees his hands, which are big and scarred and capable, the hands of a man who can take apart a pump in a ditch at midnight, shaking very slightly at his sides.

He says the word.

He says it well. He says it with the accent of a grandmother's kitchen, the soft back-of-the-throat sound that the children who learn only from books never get right, and the children hear it, and something in the room goes quiet and attentive in a way Shamiram has seen perhaps a dozen times in forty-one years.

"Write it," says Shamiram, and holds out the chalk.

He looks at the chalk.

Then he takes it, and turns to the board, and writes the word, slowly, from right to left, three letters and their dots. It takes him a long time. His dalat has its dot in the right place.

When he turns around, Ramina is staring at him with her mouth full and her eyes enormous.

"You can write?" she says.

"A little," says her father. "I'm learning."

Next chapter

Lesson Six: Bloom

The almonds open on the second week of February, all at once, the way they do every year, as if somebody in the county had flipped a switch.

On Thursday the orchards on the road to the school were black. On Friday there was a haze over them, a faint pinkish blur at the tips of the branches, like breath on glass. On Saturday the fourteenth, when Shamiram drives to the portable at a quarter to nine, the whole Valley has gone white. Mile after mile, the straight rows of trees on both sides of the road are covered in blossom so thick that the branches disappear under it, white with a pink heart, and the ground between the rows is already scattered with fallen petals like a late snow, and the air through the half-open car window smells of honey and something bitter underneath, like the inside of an apricot pit.

And the bees. The hives came in on flatbed trucks two weeks ago, stacked white boxes, and were set down at the ends of the rows in fours and sixes, and now the bees are out, and the whole orchard hums. She can hear it with the window down. It is a sound like a far-off engine that never shifts gear.

Benyamin Yonan's truck is not in the lot.

---

His wife brings the children. Shamiram has met Marisol Yonan perhaps three times, at the hall at New Year and once in the grocery store, a compact energetic woman of about forty with her hair pulled back tight and a nurse's watch pinned to her sweatshirt. She comes up the ramp with Ramina and Eddie and a cardboard tray of coffees from the drive-through on Geer Road.

"He's in the orchards," she says. "Bloom. He'll be out there till April. Frost nights, he's up at two turning on the sprinklers. The growers call him at all hours. Last night he slept four hours." She hands Shamiram a coffee. "He said to tell you he's sorry. He said to tell you he'll be at the nine o'clock next week if he has to come in his boots."

"He can come in his boots."

"I told him." Marisol looks around the portable, at the desks, the strip of letters over the board. She has never been inside it. "So this is it."

"This is it."

"He talks about it. Every night. He comes home and does his letters at the kitchen table with Ramina, and he talks about the heater." She laughs. "Eleven minutes. I've heard about those eleven minutes more than I heard about our wedding."

She stays. She says she is off until Monday and she does not want to sit in the car, and the two-adult rule says somebody has to be here, and she has always wanted to know what her children are learning, and besides, she says, she grew up in Modesto with a grandmother from Michoacán who spoke to her in a language that was not Spanish, an older one, and Marisol never learned it, and her grandmother died, and nobody in the family can speak it now.

"So," she says. "I'll sit in the back. Don't make me read anything."

---

The lesson is the orchard. It has always been the orchard, in bloom week. Shamiram teaches the words for tree, for flower, for bee, for honey, for the color white. She takes them outside, all fourteen of them in their coats, across the playground to the chain-link fence, where the orchard begins on the other side of the road, and she makes them stand at the fence in a row and look at it and say the words.

Then she gives each child a piece of chalk and a square of black construction paper and has them draw a branch in bloom and write the word for flower under it. Eddie draws a bee the size of a cat. Atra draws a branch so covered in flowers that there is no branch. Ramina draws her father, small, in a white truck, under a tree, and writes under him, very carefully, the letters for her father's name.

Marisol watches from the back of the portable and does not read anything. But Shamiram sees her lips moving when the children say the words.

---

At twelve-thirty, when the children have gone home with Marisol, Shamiram does a thing she has not done in forty-one years of Saturdays. She does not go home. She gets in her car and drives, slowly, along the road between the blooming orchards, looking for a white truck with the name of an irrigation company on the door.

She finds it on the third road, parked on the dirt at the head of a block of old trees that must be forty years old, their trunks thick and gnarled and painted white at the base. He is standing in the ditch beside a pipe, in rubber boots up to his knees, with a wrench in one hand and his phone held to his ear with his shoulder. He sees her car. He finishes his call. He climbs out of the ditch.

"Rabi," he says. "What are you—is something wrong?"

"Nothing is wrong. You missed your lesson."

He looks at her. He looks at the orchard. The bees are very loud here. A petal comes down out of the air and lands on the shoulder of his jacket, and then another.

"I'm working," he says.

"I can see. I won't keep you." She opens her purse and takes out a piece of chalk.

The hood of his truck is covered in fine dust from the orchard roads, the pale gray dust of the Valley that gets into everything in summer and is only resting in winter, waiting. She draws on it with her finger first, a line, to see if it will take. It takes. Then she draws, with the chalk, in the dust, from right to left: alap, bet, gamal, dalat.

"Next four," she says. "He, waw, zain, khet. Draw them."

He stands there in his boots with the wrench in his hand and the bees going and the blossom coming down on them both.

Then he puts the wrench on the bumper and wipes his hand on his jeans and draws them, with his finger, in the dust on the hood of his own truck. He is slow. He gets waw wrong and rubs it out with his palm and does it again. When he is done there are eight letters on the hood of the truck, four in chalk and four in finger-dust, and a petal has landed on top of khet.

"Good," she says. "Next week. Nine o'clock."

"In my boots."

"Your wife told me."

She gets back in her car. She drives away down the road between the white trees, and in her rearview mirror she sees him standing by his truck, looking down at the hood, not wiping it off.

Next chapter

Lesson Seven: Fifteen Minutes

On the twenty-first of February, she gives him fifteen minutes.

She has planned it all week. He has come at nine for two Saturdays, and taken one lesson on the hood of his truck, and sat at his kitchen table every night with Ramina and her little book, and he has eleven letters solid and five more shaky and the dots coming, slowly, the way frost comes on a windshield, a little more each night. He can read Ramina's book. He can read the hall's newsletter, if it is printed large, with his finger under the line. He can read the menu at the restaurant on Golden State and has ordered, he told her, the lamb, which Ramina does not like, so it was his own order, and he was so proud of this that he told her twice.

Fifteen minutes is nothing. Fifteen minutes is gamal and dalat, which the children know already, a review. He has only to stand at the front and point at the strip and say the letters and have the children say them back. She has seen him do harder things with a wrench.

"Fifteen minutes," she says, at nine-twenty-five, with the heater humming. "At the start. I'll be at the back."

"Rabi, no."

"Gamal and dalat. You know them. They know them. You point, they say. Fifteen minutes."

"I can't teach."

"Nobody can teach," she says. "We all just stand up and do it anyway, and afterward we find out if it was teaching."

He looks at her for a long time. Then he says, "Fifteen minutes," and goes and stands at the front of the room, next to the board, as if he were waiting for a bus.

---

It goes badly.

It goes badly from the first word. The children come in, and see him at the front, and see her at the back on the child's chair with her cane across her knees, and stop in the doorway in a little bunch, confused, like birds that have flown into a room.

"Sit down," he says. "Please. Sit down."

They sit. Ramina sits in the third row by the window and looks at her father with an expression of such fierce, terrified loyalty that Shamiram has to look away.

"Today we're going to do gamal and dalat," he says, in English.

"In Assyrian," says Shamiram, from the back, quietly.

He says it again in Assyrian. His voice is different. It is lower, softer, and the children lean in to hear it, and for a second it is all right.

Then he turns to the strip to point at gamal, and he points at the wrong letter.

It is a small thing. He points at the letter next to it, the one that comes before, and he says "gamal," and he hears himself and stops. David, in the second row, who cannot help it, who has never been able to help it, says, "That's bet."

"I know," says Benyamin. "I know that." He moves his finger. "This one. Gamal."

"Gamal," says the class, uncertain.

And from the back row, Elias, who is twelve, and whose father left in the summer, and who is angry at every man in the world, says loudly in English, "He can't even read it. My grandpa says his family can't read."

There is a silence in the portable so complete that Shamiram can hear the heater's fan blade ticking against its housing.

She is getting up. She is too slow, her knee, her cane. Benyamin has turned around. He is looking at Elias. His face is a strange gray color, and his hands are at his sides, and she sees him at nine, in the third row by the window, with his finger on the page.

"Elias," she says.

But Benyamin has already put the chalk down on the tray of the board, very carefully, the way you put down something you are afraid you will throw. He says, in Assyrian, quite quietly, "Sorry, Rabi," and walks down the aisle between the desks, past his daughter, past Shamiram, and out of the door, and down the ramp.

They hear the truck start. They hear it leave.

---

She teaches the rest of the lesson. She does not know how. She does gamal and dalat and the dots and the counting, and Atra sings the alphabet, and she sends Elias to sit on the ramp outside in the cold for ten minutes and then brings him back in and does not speak to him. At twelve-fifteen, a white truck does not flash its lights. Marisol comes instead, in her scrubs, straight from the hospital, with her car keys in her hand and her face set.

Ramina runs to her and does not cry until she is in her mother's arms, and then cries so hard that Eddie starts crying too, out of sympathy, without knowing what for.

"He called me," says Marisol, over the children's heads. "From the orchard. He said to come." She looks at Shamiram. It is not an unkind look. It is the look of a woman who has worked eleven nights in a row and has no more room for anything. "He said to tell you thank you for trying. He said to tell you he's done."

"Marisol—"

"He said you'd say that." She picks up Eddie. "I'm sorry, Rabi. I have to get them home."

---

Elias stays behind. She does not ask him to. He stands at the door with his backpack on one shoulder while the cars go, and when the lot is empty he says, without looking at her, "My grandpa did say it."

"I'm sure he did."

"It's true. My grandpa says the Yonans never read. He says Mr. Yonan's dad couldn't even sign his name in Assyrian at his own wedding."

"Is that a reason to say it to a man in front of his children?"

Elias does not answer. He kicks the doorframe.

"Your father," says Shamiram. "Can he read it?"

Elias goes very still.

"No," he says.

"Do you love him less?"

The boy's face does something terrible, and then he turns and runs down the ramp and across the lot and out the gate to the road, where his grandfather's car is waiting with the engine running, and she stands in the doorway of the portable and watches the car go away between the white orchards.

She sits down at her desk. The heater hums. On the chalkboard, at the left-hand end, are Benyamin's eleven letters from nine o'clock that morning, a little uneven, in a big man's hand. She does not wipe them off.

Next chapter

Lesson Eight: Dalat

The next Saturday she teaches dalat.

It is not in the plan. The plan for the twenty-eighth of February says waw and zain, review of the dots, and a song. She has had the plan written in her spiral notebook since August. On Friday night, at her kitchen table, with Ashur's photograph on the windowsill and the radio playing low, she crossed it out and wrote one word.

Dalat is the fourth letter. It is a small one, a little shape like a hook or a bent knee, with a single dot below it. Resh, much later in the alphabet, is the same shape exactly, with the dot above. That is the only difference. One dot, up or down. Every child who has ever sat in this portable has confused them at least once, and some of them, like Benyamin Yonan, every time.

She teaches it for two hours and fifteen minutes. She teaches it in every way she knows. She draws it as large as the whole board. She makes them stand and be it with their arms. She makes them close their eyes and draw it in the air with their noses. She teaches them every word she can think of that begins with it and every word that begins with resh, and has them sort the words into two piles on the floor, one under the dalat on the strip and one under the resh, and when they are done she makes them walk from pile to pile saying the words, and when a child gets one wrong she does not correct him. She lets the other children correct him.

At the end she asks them a question she has never asked a class before.

"Who has ever got these two wrong?"

Fourteen hands go up. Atra's goes up twice, both hands.

"I have," says Shamiram. "When I was seven. In a school a long way from here. And my teacher hit my hand with a ruler." She holds up her left hand. "This one. I am left-handed. She thought that was why."

The children stare at her hand.

"Was it?" says David.

"No. It was because they look the same." She lowers her hand. "Everything that looks the same is hard. That is not a reason to stop."

Elias, at the back, is looking at the floor.

---

Ramina is not there. Eddie is not there. The Yonans' seats in the third row by the window are empty, and Shamiram has looked at them every few minutes all morning.

At one o'clock, she drives to the house.

She has the address from the class list. It is on a street of ranch houses on the east side of town with almond trees at the end of it, a block of them, still white but going green now, the petals coming down. The house is small and yellow with a big pickup truck in the driveway and a smaller car behind it, and on the lawn there is a soccer goal with no net, and on the porch, sitting on a plastic chair in a quilted vest in the thin February sun with a bowl of something in her lap, is Atorina Yonan.

"I knew you would come," says Atorina. "I said to him, she'll come. She's a teacher. Teachers are like bill collectors." She stands, slowly, the bowl against her hip. "He's in the garage. Go. I'll make tea. Don't let him tell you he's busy, he's been fixing the same lawnmower since Tuesday."

---

The garage door is open. He is sitting on an upturned bucket among the parts of a lawnmower spread on a sheet of cardboard, with the engine in his lap and a rag in his hand, and he does not look up when her shadow falls across the cardboard.

"Rabi."

"Benyamin."

She does not sit; there is nowhere to sit. She stands with her cane in the doorway of the garage with the sun behind her.

"I'm not going to argue with you," she says. "I came to listen. If you want to talk. If you don't, I'll drink your mother's tea and go home."

He turns the engine over in his hands. He sets it on the cardboard.

"Elias was right," he says. "That's what's funny. He was right. I can't even read it."

"You can read eleven letters and five more and the dots on most of them."

"That's not reading. That's—" He gestures with the rag. "That's a kid. I'm forty-one years old, Rabi. I stood up there and pointed at the wrong letter in front of my daughter." He looks at her then. "You want to know why I quit? When I was twelve? You want to know?"

"Yes."

"You don't remember."

"No."

He nods, as if he had expected this, and as if it still hurt.

"It was the dalat," he says. "Same as last week. Same as always. I was reading out loud. You made us read out loud, one at a time, every Saturday. I was reading and I got to a word with a dalat and I read it as resh, and the word came out wrong, it came out as a different word, a funny one. And everybody laughed. And you—" He stops. He picks up a bolt from the cardboard and holds it. "You weren't mean. You were never mean. You just said, kind of tired, like it was the hundredth time, which it was, you said, 'Benyamin, you read like a man with stones in his mouth.' And they laughed harder. And I sat down. And I didn't come back the next week, and my dad didn't make me, because he didn't read either, and he said, see, the old letters are for the old men." He turns the bolt over. "That's all. That's the whole thing. It's stupid."

Shamiram stands in the doorway of the garage.

She does not remember it. That is the worst of it. She has no memory of saying it, none, and she knows, as surely as she knows the shape of dalat, that she said it, because it is exactly the kind of thing she said in nineteen ninety-seven, when she was forty-seven and teaching thirty third-graders all week and fifteen children every Saturday, and Ashur's mother was dying, and she was tired every day of her life.

"Can I say back what I heard," she says. "To be sure I have it."

He looks up, surprised.

"You were twelve. You were reading aloud and you read dalat as resh and the word came out wrong and the class laughed. And I said you read like a man with stones in his mouth. And they laughed harder. And you sat down, and you never came back, and your father let you stop, because he thought the letters didn't matter. And you've carried it for twenty-nine years." She waits. "Is that it?"

He is very still.

"Yes," he says. "That's it."

"Then I'm sorry," she says. "I'm sorry I said it. I'm sorry I don't remember saying it, because that means I said things like it to other children too, and I don't remember them either. I was a tired woman and I was careless with you. You didn't have stones in your mouth. You had a hard letter in front of you, and a teacher who should have known better." She grips the cane. "And last week I put you in front of a room again before you were ready, because I'm in a hurry, because I'm old and nobody has signed my sheet. That was careless too. I'm sorry for both."

He looks at her for a long time, there in the garage, with the bolt in his hand and the lawnmower in pieces around him.

From the kitchen, through the door into the house, comes the sound of Atorina setting cups down hard on a counter, so that they know the tea is ready, and also so that they know she has been listening.

"Okay," he says. His voice is rough. "Okay, Rabi."

"Nine o'clock," she says. "If you want. Not to teach. Just the heater."

He puts the bolt down on the cardboard where it belongs.

"I'll think about it," he says.

Next chapter

Lesson Nine: Khigga

He comes at nine on the seventh of March. He comes in his boots, with orchard dust on them, and sits on the child's chair and watches the heater for eleven minutes without a word, and then goes to the left-hand end of the board and draws, without being asked, all twenty-two letters, slowly, from alap to taw.

He gets two wrong. He sees them himself and fixes them.

She does not say anything about it. She hands him his coffee.

"I'm not standing up there," he says.

"I know. Today you can sit. Today is dance."

---

She teaches the dance every year in March, because in March the children are restless and the New Year is coming at the start of April, the old spring New Year that their grandparents kept and that the hall still celebrates with a picnic in the park and music and a line of dancers going around and around the grass all afternoon. Every child in this room will be at that picnic. Every one of them will be pulled into the line by an aunt or a grandmother. She has always thought they should at least know which foot to start on.

They push the desks to the walls. It takes ten minutes and a great deal of noise, and Eddie Yonan gets stuck behind a desk and has to be rescued. The middle of the portable is bare linoleum, scuffed and gray, and the children stand on it in a confused bunch, and Shamiram goes to the old cassette player she keeps on the windowsill, which Ashur bought at a yard sale in nineteen ninety and which has outlived him, and puts in a tape.

The music comes out tinny and loud. A drum, a deep one, the big two-headed drum that a man carries on a strap at the weddings and beats with a stick on one side and a switch on the other. And over the drum, the high reedy wail of the zurna, a horn that sounds like a goose that has learned to sing. The rhythm is simple and insistent and goes straight into the feet.

"Khigga," she says. "Everybody knows khigga. Your aunties do it at every wedding. Hold hands. No, little fingers. Link little fingers. Like this."

She shows them. She links her own little finger with Atra's, and Atra links hers with David's, and the line begins to form, crooked, giggling, children linking pinkies and arguing about who is next to whom. She shows them the step: right foot forward, then back, then a little skip to the side, the shoulders loose, the whole line moving slowly sideways to the right, always to the right, the way the line has moved at every wedding and every picnic for longer than anyone can say.

They are terrible. They step on each other. The line breaks three times. Eddie keeps going left.

"The leader," she says, a little out of breath. Her knee is complaining. "Somebody has to lead. The leader is at the front of the line, on the right end, and he holds a handkerchief, and he waves it, and he decides when the line goes faster and when it does fancy steps, and everyone watches him. Who will lead?"

Nobody moves. Then Ramina, in the line, between David and a girl named Nahrin, says, "My dad leads."

Everyone looks at the back of the room.

Benyamin is sitting on the child's chair with his coffee. He shakes his head.

"He does," says Ramina, to the class. "At every wedding. My Nana says he's the best leader in Turlock. He did my cousin's wedding for two hours and my uncle had to give him water."

"Ramina."

"You did."

Shamiram goes to her desk. She opens the top drawer, where she keeps a box of tissues, three red pens, a roll of tape, and, folded very small, a white cotton handkerchief with a blue border that her husband waved at their own wedding in nineteen seventy-five, in another country, at the head of a line of two hundred people. She has not taken it out of the drawer in seven years.

She shakes it out. She walks to the back of the room and holds it out to Benyamin.

He looks at it. He knows what it is. Everyone at the hall knows what it is.

"Rabi, I can't take that."

"You're not taking it. You're borrowing it. For one song." She holds it out. "Please. My knee."

He stands up. He takes the handkerchief.

---

She has seen a great many men lead the khigga. Her husband was one of the best of his generation. But she has not seen anything like what happens in Portable Four on the seventh of March, when Benyamin Yonan goes to the front of a crooked line of fourteen children and links his little finger with his daughter's and lifts Ashur's handkerchief over his head.

He changes. That is the only way she can say it afterward, at her kitchen table, to the photograph. He stands differently. The heaviness goes out of his shoulders. He looks down the line, all the way to the end, to Eddie, who is still going left, and he smiles at Eddie, and Eddie, seeing it, stops going left. He says, "Watch my feet. Just my feet. Right, and back, and skip. Ready? With the drum," and the drum on the tinny tape goes, and he goes, and the line goes with him.

He does not go fast. He goes at exactly the speed of the slowest child. He watches the end of the line, not the front, the whole time, and when the line starts to break he slows down, and when it holds he speeds up a little, and he calls out the steps in Assyrian, short words, right, back, now, good, good, and the children answer without knowing they are answering, and the handkerchief goes around and around over his head in a white circle with a blue edge. Ramina is laughing so hard she can barely step. Elias, who said he would not dance, is in the line at the far end next to Eddie, holding Eddie's little finger, keeping him going the right way.

Shamiram stands by the window, by the cassette player, and watches.

When the song ends, the children collapse on the linoleum, shouting. Benyamin stands at the front of the room, breathing hard, with the handkerchief in his hand, and looks around as if he has woken up somewhere unexpected.

"You watched the end of the line," says Shamiram.

He looks at her.

"The whole time," she says. "You watched the slowest child. Not your own feet. Not the front. The end." She picks up her cane from where she leaned it against the windowsill. "That is the only thing I know about teaching, Benyamin. The rest is chalk."

He looks down at the handkerchief. He folds it, slowly, into a small square, and holds it out to her.

"Keep it till New Year," she says. "You'll need it at the picnic."

Next chapter

Lesson Ten: Names

Dr. Ninva Youkhana keeps her word. She cannot stand in the portable every week, but on the fourteenth of March she stands in it for one, with three of her graduate students and a flatbed scanner in a padded case, and a laptop, and four cardboard boxes that Shamiram carried down from her garage rafters on Thursday with Benyamin's help.

The boxes are forty years of class photographs.

Every June since nineteen eighty-six, on the last Saturday, Ashur took a picture of the class on the ramp of whatever building they were using. First it was the back room of the old hall, before the hall moved to Golden State. Then a borrowed classroom at the junior college for two years. Then the portable. Every June, a row of children squinting into the sun on a ramp, with Shamiram at one end and, after nineteen ninety, a cassette player somewhere in the frame because Ashur thought it was funny. Ashur printed them at the drugstore and wrote the year on the back in pencil and put them in the boxes, and after he died she could not look at them, and they went up into the rafters with the Christmas lights.

"We're going to scan all of them," says Ninva. "And the attendance books, if you'll let us. And your lesson notebooks." She has seen the notebooks; she touched the first one, from nineteen eighty-five, with the tips of her fingers, as if it were very old paper in a museum. "And then we'll put them up for the families. On the hall's family pages, where the members already share things. Every family can find their own children. Their parents. Themselves."

"Who will look at them?"

Ninva laughs. "Rabi. Everyone. Everyone will look at them."

---

The lesson is names. It is always names in the middle of March, because by the middle of March the children know enough letters to write their own, and nothing in the whole language means as much to a child as seeing his own name come out of the end of his own chalk in the letters of his great-grandparents.

She writes each name on the board in large letters and the child copies it, and then writes it again, smaller, in his notebook, and then writes it a third time on a card that she will laminate at the school district office on Monday and give back to him in June. Some of the names are old names, the oldest, names of kings and queens and heroes and cities that were already ancient when the letters on the strip were new: Sargon, Ninos, Ashur, Atra, Nahrin, Shamiram. Some are names from the old stories. Some are American names, David, Sophia, Eddie, which she spells out letter by letter, finding the sounds, so that the child can see that his American name fits in the old alphabet too, that it was always going to fit.

"What does Shamiram mean?" asks Atra.

"It was a queen's name. A long time ago. A queen who built gardens." Shamiram writes her own name on the board, the letters joined, the dots in place. "My mother named me after her because she wanted a girl who would build gardens. Instead she got a girl who stands in a box behind a playground with chalk on her hands."

"That's kind of like a garden," says Atra, after thinking about it, and Shamiram has to turn back to the board for a minute.

---

Benyamin is not at the back. Benyamin is at the front.

He has been at the front since nine o'clock, when he came in and watched the heater and drew his twenty-two letters and then, without being asked, stood at the side of the board with the eraser, as he had in January, and helped. Now he stands next to each child as they write their name. He does not correct them. He watches the end of the line. When a child's hand slows, when the chalk stops in the middle of a letter, he says, quietly, the sound of the next letter, just the sound, and the hand starts again.

When it is Ramina's turn, she writes her name very fast, showing off, and then holds the chalk out to her father.

"Yours," she says.

He takes it. He writes his own name on the board, under hers. Benyamin. It is a long name with a lot of letters, and he writes them all, from right to left, slowly, and gets the dots right, and when he steps back, Shamiram sees his ears go red under his cap.

"And Mom's," says Ramina.

Marisol is at the back. She has come with the children for the third Saturday in a row; she has switched her shifts, Shamiram suspects, though she does not say so. She is sitting on the child's chair with her coat on and a coffee in her hands, and when Ramina says "And Mom's," she shakes her head and laughs.

"My name doesn't go in that."

"Everything goes in it," says Benyamin, from the board, and then looks startled, as if somebody else had said it. He looks at Shamiram. She says nothing. He turns back to the board.

He spells it out. Marisol. He sounds it, letter by letter, finding them, the M and the long A and the R, which is resh, with its dot above, and he gets it right, and the S, and the O, and the L, which is lamad, tall as a flagpole, and when he has finished there is his wife's name in the old letters on the green board under his own and their daughter's.

Marisol looks at it for a long time. Then she gets up and comes to the front and takes the chalk out of her husband's hand and, very slowly, under his, with her tongue between her teeth like Atra, copies it.

---

At eleven, the graduate students come to the door of the portable and say they have found something.

They have set up the scanner on a table in the corner, and the laptop beside it, and they have been working through the first box while the class went on, and on the laptop's screen is a photograph from nineteen ninety-four. A row of children on a ramp in the sun. Shamiram, forty-four, at one end, in a flowered dress, with her hair still black. The cassette player, on the ramp rail, tilted at an angle. And in the middle of the row, a big solemn boy of nine in a striped shirt, squinting, holding up a laminated card with his name on it.

Everyone crowds around. The children push to see.

"That's Dad," says Ramina. "That's Dad."

Benyamin stands behind them and looks at the screen. He does not say anything. The boy in the photograph holds his name card up to the camera with both hands, and you can see, if you look closely, that the dalat in the middle of it has its dot on top.

"You kept that," he says finally, to Shamiram.

"Ashur kept it. He kept everything."

"I remember that day." He leans closer. "I got it wrong on the card, and you said leave it, it's still your name, and I was so mad." He laughs, a short sound. "I threw that card away. I threw it in the creek behind our house."

"I know," says Shamiram. "You told me. The next week. You said a fish was reading it."

He turns and looks at her.

"I said that?"

"You said that. You were nine. You thought it was very funny." She smiles. "I didn't remember until just now."

That evening, the photograph goes up on the hall's family pages, with all the others from the first box, and by Sunday morning there are three hundred and twelve comments, and one of them is from a man in Chicago who writes that he is the boy at the far left of the nineteen eighty-eight picture, with the bandage on his knee, and that he has not thought about that ramp in thirty years, and that he can still write his name, and here it is, and there it is, in the old letters, typed in.

Next chapter

Lesson Eleven: Nisan

On the twenty-eighth of March, Benyamin teaches the first half hour.

He asked for it. That is the difference. On the Saturday before, while the heater ticked, he said, not looking at her, "Next week. The spring words. Can I do the first part. Not the whole thing. The first part," and she said, "Yes," and nothing else, and has been afraid all week that he would not come.

He comes. He comes at a quarter to nine, before her, which has never happened, and when she pulls into the lot his truck is already by the ramp and the portable's lights are on and through the window she can see him standing at the board with his back to her, drawing.

The board is covered. He has drawn the whole spring on it. A tree, an almond tree, the branches going up and out across the green slate, and every branch covered in chalk blossom, and under the tree the grass, and a sun, and birds that are not very good, and among the branches, here and there, hanging like fruit, the words. Tree. Flower. Grass. Green. Bird. Sun. Spring. New. Year.

She stands in the doorway with her cane.

"Too much?" he says.

"No," she says. "No. It's exactly right."

---

He teaches the first half hour. He makes mistakes. He forgets the word for bird for a moment and stands there with the chalk, and then David says it, and he says, "Thank you, David," the way she would, and goes on. He reads each word off the tree and the children say it after him, and then he has them come up one at a time and find a word he calls out, and they climb on a chair to reach the high branches, and he holds the chair.

Elias does not come up. Elias is at the back, with his arms folded. He has been quiet for five weeks. He comes every Saturday and does the work and speaks to no one and leaves.

When it is his turn, Benyamin calls the word for new, and Elias does not move.

Benyamin waits. Shamiram, on the child's chair, waits. She does not say anything. She has decided she will not say anything, whatever happens, for this half hour, and she sits on her hands.

"Elias," says Benyamin. "New. It's up at the top. I put it too high, I think. I'll hold the chair."

Elias gets up. He comes to the front. He climbs on the chair, and Benyamin holds it, and the boy reaches up into the chalk branches and touches the word, and says it, and climbs down.

He does not go back to his seat. He stands by the chair.

"My grandpa says sorry," he says, very fast, very low, so that only the front row and Benyamin and Shamiram can hear. "No. I say sorry. My grandpa doesn't say sorry for anything."

Benyamin looks at him.

"Okay," he says.

"And I want you to teach me to lead," says Elias. "The dance. At the picnic. My dad used to." He stops. "I want to learn the handkerchief."

Benyamin is quiet for a moment. Then he says, "After class. Ten minutes. We'll push two desks," and Elias nods once and goes back to his seat with his face burning, and Shamiram, on her hands, on the child's chair, looks very hard at the almond tree on the board.

---

The second half of the lesson is hers, and it is the New Year.

She tells them the old custom, the one her own grandmother kept in a village whose orchards were apricots and not almonds. On the first morning of the spring New Year, before anyone in the house was awake, the children went out into the fields and pulled up handfuls of new grass and wildflowers and wove them into a little wreath or a bundle and hung it over the front door, so that the first thing anyone saw when they opened their door in the New Year was something green and growing. She tells them what her grandmother told her: that the green over the door was a promise that the year would be good. That everything that comes back after winter deserves to be welcomed at the door.

Then she takes them outside.

They go across the playground to the fence, as they did in bloom week, but this time she has a key, borrowed from the custodian, and they go through the gate and across the road, all of them holding little fingers in a line, with Benyamin at the front and Shamiram at the back with her cane. On the far side of the road, at the edge of the orchard, where the irrigation ditch runs along the end of the rows, the grass is new and tall and full of small yellow flowers, and the almond trees are in full green leaf now, the petals long gone, the tiny fuzzy green nuts already set on the branches.

The children pull grass. They pick yellow flowers. Benyamin goes into the ditch in his boots and comes out with a handful of something purple, and the farmer who owns the block, who knows him, drives by in a pickup and waves.

Back in the portable, they make bundles. Atra makes one so large it has to be carried by two people. Eddie makes one that is entirely flowers and no grass. They tie them with string and hang them over the portable's door on the outside, on the nail where the district hangs its fire inspection certificate, and then they stand at the bottom of the ramp, all fourteen of them and Marisol and Atorina, who has come with a basket of kada, and look at it: a big untidy bundle of green and yellow and purple on a beige portable behind a playground, swinging a little in the wind.

"It looks like a mess," says Elias.

"It looks like the New Year," says Shamiram.

---

The next Saturday there is no class. There is the picnic.

It is in the big park by the canal, on the first weekend of April, and it seems to Shamiram that half of Turlock is there, the whole hall and their cousins from Modesto and Ceres and San Jose, and there are grills going and canopies up and long tables of food and children running everywhere, and the drum, a real one, and a real zurna, and by two in the afternoon there is a line of two hundred people going around and around the grass in the khigga, little fingers linked, moving always to the right.

Benyamin leads it for an hour. Then, for one song, he gives the handkerchief to Elias, who leads it badly and fiercely with his face lit up like a lamp, and the whole line slows down to his speed without being told, and an old man at the end of the line, Elias's grandfather, who does not say sorry for anything, is in it, holding a stranger's little finger, and Shamiram, sitting on a folding chair under a canopy with her knee up on a cooler, sees him wipe his eyes with the back of his hand.

Next chapter

Lesson Twelve: The Chair

On the eighteenth of April, her knee goes.

It goes on the ramp. It has been threatening to all spring, and the doctor in Modesto has been saying since January that it needs to be replaced and that she cannot keep putting it off, and she has been saying, in June, after the last class, in June. At five to nine on a cool bright Saturday with the orchards green on every side and the sky enormous, she is halfway up the ramp to Portable Four with her bag on one shoulder and her cane in her hand when the knee simply stops being a knee. It folds sideways, quite gently, like a card table, and she goes down onto the ramp on her hip and her elbow and lies there with her bag spilled and her chalk rolling down the ramp toward the asphalt, one stick after another, white, bumping over the ridges.

She lies there and looks at the sky. It is very blue. A hawk is going over, very high, turning.

Then there is a big shape blocking the sun, and Benyamin Yonan is on his knees on the ramp beside her saying, "Don't move, Rabi, don't move, where does it hurt," and she says, "My dignity," and he laughs, a startled, frightened laugh, and puts his arm under her shoulders.

---

Nothing is broken. He makes her move every finger and every toe before he lets her sit up. Then he carries her, actually carries her, up the rest of the ramp and into the portable as if she weighed what Eddie weighs, and sets her down in the big chair behind her desk, and gets the ice pack out of the first aid box under the sink, which she did not know still had an ice pack in it, and kneels and puts it on her knee and holds it there.

"I'm calling Marisol," he says.

"Don't call Marisol. Marisol is asleep. She worked last night."

"I'm calling your son."

"My son is in Sacramento. He will drive here at ninety miles an hour and lecture me." She closes her eyes. The knee is a hot white throb. "I'm all right. I'm not all right. I'm all right enough. Give me twenty minutes."

"The kids are coming in twenty minutes."

"I know."

She opens her eyes and looks at him. He is kneeling on the floor beside her chair with the ice pack, and he looks back at her, and she sees him understand.

"No," he says.

"Benyamin."

"Rabi. No. The whole thing? I did half an hour. I've done half an hour once."

"And it was good."

"It was half an hour."

"Then do four half hours." She puts her hand on his shoulder. "I will sit right here. I will not move. I cannot move. If you need me, you look at me, and I will tell you. But I will not get up, because I can't, and I will not take over, because I can't. Please."

He looks at her for a long time.

Then he stands up. He goes and gets the plan from her bag, which he has picked up off the ramp with all her chalk, and he reads it, standing by the board, slowly, with his finger under the lines. The plan for the eighteenth of April says: semkat, ain, pe. Review the dots. Words for the body. Song.

"Okay," he says, to the plan, not to her. "Okay."

---

She watches him teach for two hours and fifteen minutes from the big chair behind the desk with an ice pack on her knee, and she does not say a word.

He is not her. That is the first thing, and it is a relief. He does not walk up and down with the pointer. He does not make the little ones stand on chairs. He stands at the front, mostly, in one place, big and solid, and he talks in a low voice, so that the children have to be quiet to hear him, and they are.

He does the letters first, the three new ones. He gets semkat right. He gets ain right. He hesitates on pe, and then he says, to the class, "This one I always mix up. You tell me if I get it wrong," and draws it, and gets it right, and Atra claps.

He does the body words. He does them the way nobody has ever done them in this room, by making the children touch each part on him. He kneels on the floor so they can reach. Head, says Ramina, and puts her hand on his head. Ear, says David, and pulls his ear. Nose, says Eddie, and nearly puts his finger up it, and the whole room shrieks. Shoulder. Arm. Hand. Knee, says Atra, and pats his knee, and then she looks across the room at Shamiram in the big chair with the ice pack, and says, "Rabi's knee is broken," and Benyamin says, "Not broken. Tired. It's been teaching for forty-one years," and the children all turn and look at Shamiram's knee with great respect.

He does the dots. He does the dots better than she does. He does them with his hands, the way he does everything: two fists side by side, held up over his head for the a; one fist up and one fist down for the e. The children copy him. Fourteen children with their fists up over their heads and down at their knees, saying the vowels, and it works, Shamiram can see it working, she can see David, who has always known the dots, and Atra, who has never known them, both getting it at the same speed.

And he watches the end of the line. The whole time. She sees him do it. Whenever a child falls behind, whenever a hand stops, his eyes go to it, and he slows down, and he waits, and he says the sound, just the sound, and the hand starts again.

The song is the alphabet song, the one Atra sings. He does not know it. He asks Atra to lead it. Atra stands on a chair and sings the twenty-two letters in her small high voice, and the class sings it after her, and Benyamin stands at the side of the board and sings it too, half a line behind the children, learning it.

---

When the lights of the cars flash at twelve-fifteen and the children have gone, he sits down on the child's chair at the back of the room, his chair, and puts his face in his hands.

She lets him sit.

"Was that teaching?" he says finally, through his hands.

"Ask them," she says. "In September. That's the only way you ever find out."

He takes his hands away from his face. He looks at her.

"I didn't say yes," he says.

"I know you didn't."

"I'm just saying. So you know."

"I know," she says. "Help me to the car, Benyamin. I'm going to Modesto to let a man with a saw look at my knee."

Next chapter

Lesson Thirteen: Taw

Taw is the last letter. It sits at the window end of the strip, a loop with a tail, and for forty-one years she has saved it for the last Saturday in May, so that the last thing every class learns from her is the end of something.

On the thirtieth of May, she comes up the ramp on a walker.

There is a handrail on the ramp now, on both sides, galvanized pipe, solid as a bridge. It was not there in April. It appeared the week after she fell, and when she asked the custodian about it he said the district had not put it in, and when she asked Benyamin he said he did not know anything about handrails, and Marisol, behind him, rolled her eyes all the way to the ceiling.

The surgery is in nine days. The doctor in Modesto has explained it to her twice with a plastic model of a knee that comes apart in pieces, and she has nodded, and she has asked him whether she will be able to dance, and he has said, not this year, Mrs. Odisho, and she has said, then next year, and he has looked at her over his glasses the way her own pupils used to look at her when she said there would be a test.

She has taught the five Saturdays since the fall from the big chair behind the desk. That is, she has sat in the big chair behind the desk, and Benyamin has taught, and she has said perhaps one thing in every half hour, and the one thing has gotten shorter every week. On the ninth of May she said only, at the end, "The dots under resh, Benyamin, they're above," and he said, "I know, Rabi, I did it on purpose to see if David would catch it," and David had not caught it, and was outraged.

---

On the sixteenth of May, Dr. Youkhana brings a microphone.

It is a small black one on a stand no taller than a coffee cup, and she sets it on the desk in front of the big chair after the children have gone, and plugs it into her laptop, and sits on the edge of a child's desk with her coat still on.

"The letters," she says. "In your voice. All twenty-two, and a word for each one. For the family pages, next to the photographs. So that a child in Chicago, or in Nevada, or in this town in fifty years, can press on alap and hear you say it."

Shamiram looks at the microphone for a long time. Ashur used to tease her that she would talk to anything that held still. She has never once in her life talked to a machine on purpose.

"In fifty years," she says.

"In fifty years."

So she does it. She sits in the big chair with her bad knee up on a second chair and says the letters into the little black microphone, slowly, from alap to taw, the way her grandmother said them to her in a room with a dirt floor and a window full of apricot branches. After each letter, a word. Alap, and the word for mother. Bet, and the word for house. Gamal, and the word for camel, which makes Ninva laugh, because no child in Turlock has seen one. She does not hurry. She does not think about who will listen. She thinks of the boy at the far left of the nineteen eighty-eight picture, with the bandage on his knee, typing his name.

When she reaches taw, she stops, and looks at the back of the room, where Benyamin is stacking chairs and pretending not to listen.

"Again," she says to Ninva. "From the beginning. Two voices. I say the letter, he says the word."

Benyamin puts down a chair.

"Rabi, my accent—"

"Your accent is a grandmother's kitchen," she says. "Children should hear it. Come here."

He comes. He kneels by the desk so that his mouth is level with the microphone, the way he knelt for the body words, and they go through the alphabet a second time, her old thin voice and his low one, letter and word, letter and word. He stumbles once, at pe. Ninva does not stop the recording. Shamiram does not correct him. He finds the word on his own, a second late, and says it, and they go on.

---

Today there are more than fourteen children. There are twenty-two. The other eight are brothers and sisters, and cousins, and two children from the far east side whose mother saw the photographs on the hall's family pages and found her own father in the nineteen eighty-seven picture, the boy with the cowlick, and drove them across town to see the room. There are parents standing along the walls. Atorina is there with two baskets of kada. Khamis Daniel is there in a jacket and tie, with Juliet, who has her spiral notebook. Dr. Youkhana is there with her two small boys and a camera. Marisol is there, not at the back, but at the side of the board, holding the eraser.

And in the big chair behind the desk, with her walker beside her, Shamiram watches Benyamin Yonan teach taw.

He teaches it the way she would never have thought to. He tells them it is the last letter, and then he asks them what else is the last of something. The last day of school. The last kada in the basket. The last song at a wedding. The last almond on the tree, which the crows get. And then he says, "And the last letter is also how you know the alphabet is finished, so you can go back to alap. You can't go back to the beginning until you get to the end." He draws taw on the board, large, the loop and the tail. Then, beside it, on its right, so that a reader's eye would come to it first, he draws alap. "See? The end and the beginning are next to each other. They're always next to each other."

Shamiram, in the big chair, has to look out the window for a while at the orchard. The almonds are big now on the branches, green and fuzzy, the size of a thumb. In August the shakers will come, the machines that grip each trunk and shake it until every nut comes down at once, rattling on the ground like hail.

---

At eleven, Khamis makes a speech. He has a voice like a radio announcer and he uses all of it. He talks about the founding of the hall, and the first Saturday class in nineteen eighty-five, in the back room, with six children and one teacher. He talks about the generations. He talks about the language as a river, which he has been doing at every hall function for thirty years, and the parents along the walls smile at each other. He talks, at the end, quite simply, about Shamiram, and his voice goes rough, and he stops, and Juliet hands him a tissue.

Then the children give her a card. It is a big piece of poster board, folded in half, and on the inside every child has written their name in the old letters, and drawn something. Atra has drawn a garden. Elias has drawn a handkerchief. Ramina has drawn the heater, with eleven little clocks around it.

Then Atorina hands out kada, and Benyamin puts Ashur's old cassette in Ashur's old player, and they push the desks to the walls, and twenty-two children and fourteen parents and a retired pharmacist in a tie link little fingers and dance the khigga in a beige portable behind a playground, with Benyamin at the front with the handkerchief and Elias at the end next to Eddie, keeping him going right, and Shamiram in the big chair, clapping the rhythm on the arm of the chair with her palm, because she cannot do anything else, and it is enough.

---

At the end, Dr. Youkhana takes the photograph on the ramp. All twenty-two children, in rows, squinting, holding their laminated name cards up to the camera. Shamiram at one end, in a chair Benyamin carried out for her. The cassette player on the new handrail, tilted at an angle, because Ramina insisted.

Then they go. The parents shake her hand, and some of them cry, and some of the children hug her and some of them are too shy and wave from the bottom of the ramp. Khamis kisses her on both cheeks and says "We will find someone," and she says "Khamis," and he says, "I know, I know," and goes.

Benyamin stays to stack the chairs.

He stacks them all, and puts the desks back in rows, and wipes the board, all of it except the left-hand end, where his own twenty-two letters from nine o'clock are still drawn in his big careful hand. He leaves those. Then he comes and stands by the big chair.

She has the key in her hand. It is the key to Portable Four, on a ring with a plastic tag that says P4 in Ashur's handwriting. She has had it since nineteen ninety-eight.

She holds it out.

He looks at it.

"The sheet at the hall," he says. "It's still blank. I looked on Thursday."

"I know."

"I didn't sign it."

"I know you didn't."

"I'm just—"

"Saying. So I know." She keeps the key held out. "I'm not asking you to sign it. I'm asking you to keep the key over the summer, because I'm going to be in a hospital bed and then a rehabilitation place and then my son's house in Sacramento, and somebody has to check that the heater doesn't catch fire and the gophers don't get in. That's all."

He takes the key.

"That's all," he says.

"That's all."

He helps her down the ramp, on the walker, between the two new handrails, one step at a time, and into her car, and puts the walker in the back seat. Then he stands in the lot with the key in his hand, looking up at the portable, at the dead bundle of New Year's grass still hanging over the door, brown now, on the inspection certificate nail.

"Rabi," he says, through her window. "What do I do with the bundle?"

"Leave it," she says. "Until the next one."

Next chapter

Lesson One, Again

The knee is made of metal now, and it does not hurt the way it used to. It hurts a new way, a bright clean way, and the young woman at the rehabilitation place in Sacramento who made her walk up and down a set of four wooden steps forty times a day for six weeks said that was good, that meant it was working, and Shamiram said that was what she used to tell children about long division.

She comes home to Lander Avenue on the twenty-second of August. Her son drives her, at the speed limit, lecturing. Sargon is forty-eight and an engineer and has her husband's bald head and her own way of explaining things twice, and he stays three days and fixes the gate and fills her refrigerator and makes her promise not to drive until the doctor says so.

On the third day, before he leaves, Khamis Daniel calls.

"The sheet," says Khamis. His voice is so loud that Sargon, across the kitchen, hears it. "Shamiram. The sheet is signed."

She sits down.

"Who?"

"He said not to tell you. He said you would know." Khamis is enjoying himself enormously. "He said, and I'm to say it exactly, 'Tell Rabi I am just saying, so she knows.'"

She puts the phone down on the table without hanging up, and Khamis's voice goes on talking into the wood for a while, about the river, and Sargon comes over and picks it up and says, "Mr. Daniel? This is Sargon. She'll call you back," and hangs up, and looks at his mother.

"Mom? Are you crying?"

"No," she says.

---

The doctor says she can drive on the fourth of September. On the twelfth, a Saturday, she drives to the school.

She leaves the house at eight-thirty, earlier than she needs to, and she drives slowly along the road between the orchards. The harvest is over. The shakers have come and gone, and the nuts have been swept into long windrows between the rows and picked up and taken away, and the ground under the trees is bare and swept and pale, and the trees stand in their straight lines with their dark leaves, resting. The dust of the harvest still hangs over the Valley, a fine gold haze, and the morning sun comes through it low and warm and makes everything look like an old photograph.

She pulls into the lot at eight-forty-five.

The lights in Portable Four are on.

She does not park by the ramp. She parks at the far end of the lot, by the dumpsters, and she leaves the engine running for the air conditioning, and she sits in the car and looks at the portable through the windshield. She does not know why she does this. She understands it perfectly.

Through the window at the near end, she can see him. He is sitting at the back of the room on a child's chair with his knees up near his chin and a thermos cup in his hands, watching the heater. It is September; the heater does not need to be on. He has turned it on anyway.

She watches him for eleven minutes. She does not look at her watch. She does not need to.

At eight-fifty-six, he gets up and goes to the board.

She cannot see what he draws. She knows what he draws.

---

At nine-thirty the first cars come. She watches them from the far end of the lot: the anxious parents first, the little ones in their new school clothes, then the middle ones, then two big boys, Ninos and Elias, Elias taller by an inch since June, arriving exactly at nine-forty-five so that nobody can say they were early. More cars. More children. She counts without meaning to. Nineteen. Twenty-three. Twenty-six. Three of the cars she does not recognize at all, and one of them has a license plate from Nevada.

Marisol's car pulls in last, and Marisol gets out in her scrubs with a cardboard tray of coffees, and looks across the lot, and sees Shamiram's car by the dumpsters, and stops.

Then she walks across the lot, the whole width of it, to the car, and taps on the window.

Shamiram rolls it down.

"He's been here since seven," says Marisol. "He couldn't sleep. He did his letters at the kitchen table at four in the morning." She holds out a coffee. "He needs a second adult. District rules. I'm on at the hospital at eleven." She looks at Shamiram for a long moment. "I told him you'd come. He said you wouldn't come in. He said you'd sit in the car."

"He knows me."

"He said that too."

---

There is a new strip over the chalkboard.

She sees it as soon as she comes through the door, slowly, on the cane, up the ramp between the two handrails. Her own strip is still there, the twenty-two white letters she painted in a garage in nineteen eighty-five, from alap at the door end to taw at the window. But under it, there is a second strip, a little narrower, newer plywood, and on it, painted in white in a big careful hand that is not quite steady, are the same twenty-two letters, in the same order, from right to left. The dalat has its dot below. The resh has its dot above.

Under the new strip, at the right-hand end of the board, by the door, where every child in the room can see it, he has drawn alap in chalk, very large. A slanted stroke with a foot. A person leaning into the wind.

He is standing at the front of the room with twenty-six children in front of him and the chalk in his hand, and he has just opened his mouth to begin, and he sees her in the doorway, and stops.

The children turn around.

"Rabi," says Ramina, in the third row by the window, in a whisper so loud it fills the portable.

Shamiram does not go to the front. She does not go to the big chair behind the desk. She walks down the aisle between the desks, slowly, on her new knee, to the back of the room, where there is a child's chair against the wall with a thermos cup on the floor beside it, and she sits down on it, carefully, with her knees up near her chin.

Benyamin Yonan looks at her across the room for a long time. She looks back at him. She does not say anything. It is the hardest thing she has done in forty-one years, and she does it.

He turns to the class.

"Shlama," he says.

"Shlama," say twenty-six voices, some loudly, some into their collars.

"We have a second adult today," he says. "District rules. She's going to sit at the back. If I get a dot wrong, she's going to tell me." He picks up the pointer. He turns to the board, to the big chalk letter by the door. "This is alap. Alap is the door. You can't come into the house without the door."

He points. The children say it.

And at the back of Portable Four, on a child's chair, with the heater ticking for no reason in the warm September air and the morning coming gold through the dusty window, Shamiram Odisho says it with them.

About this book

For forty-one years, Shamiram Odisho has switched on the heater in a beige school portable behind a Turlock playground at nine o'clock on Saturday mornings and taught children the twenty-two letters of the Assyrian alphabet, painted in white above her green chalkboard. Now she is seventy-six, her knee is failing, and this spring term is her last. The sign-up sheet for the next teacher has hung at the community hall since October. Nobody has signed it.

Every Saturday, one father parks his work truck by the dumpsters and waits outside with the engine running. Benyamin Yonan speaks the language like a grandmother's kitchen and reads it like a frightened nine-year-old, because he once sat in that same portable, third row by the window, and quit at twelve. Shamiram asks him to carry a box. Then to sit at the back. Then to come half an hour early and watch the heater warm up.

Through fog, almond bloom, kada baking, a khigga lesson with her late husband's handkerchief and a mistake in front of his daughter that sends him out the door, a stubborn teacher and a reluctant parent work toward a September neither of them will promise.

Members can react to this book and talk about it in the members' Library.

Ownership

This book is owned by CRUNOD LLC. It is free to read on EternalCurrent.Online. No part of it may be copied, reprinted, sold, recorded or adapted, including as audio, film or translation, without written permission from CRUNOD LLC.

EternalCurrent.Online