The Hidden Palace (The Golem and the Jinni, #2)

by Helene Wecker

But the children of Little Syria noticed. They’d wake in the night, roused by a snoring parent or a restless sibling, and look out the window in time to spy the couple on a nearby rooftop. Or, they’d sit blanket-wrapped on the fire escape and overhear an argument conducted in the pair’s telltale blend of languages, which changed so quickly between Arabic, English, and Yiddish that the children were left to grasp at half sentences, formless bursts of rhetoric. They mean well, but . . . Their bizarre insistence upon . . . You give them too little . . . Who, the children wondered, were the they the pair spoke of? And who was she, the tall woman in the cloak, who could draw so many words from their silent Mister Ahmad? They would watch, and listen; and on morning walks to school they’d trade their information, and speculate about where the couple went every night, with suggestions ranging from the prosaic to the salacious.

She wrote, in response to a question asked in a goodreads ama several years anon…

“If you like him, I suppose you can see him on alternate Thursdays.” She responded to this with an Italian phrase they’d heard near Mulberry Street; it translated to “misery pig,” an image so evocative that they’d added it at once to the lexicon of borrowed human idioms that now peppered their conversations. The Jinni’s particular favorite was don’t bite my head off, overheard on a summer night when they’d walked beneath a couple arguing on a fire escape. The phrase itself, and the plaintive anger with which the man had yelled it—Sweet Jaysus, Bernice, don’t bite my head off!—had struck the Jinni as indescribably hilarious, and he’d laughed so hard that the Golem had been forced to grab his elbow and half drag him down the street before the furious man could come after them. Her own favorite idioms tended to be terms of frustration, and she was given many opportunities to practice them.

One, imagining a plain supper and a cheap novel, might feel glum at the prospect; another, picturing the same, was filled with contentment.

They usedta walk up there, and talk in different languages, all twisted together.

The important thing is that we talk to each other, she’d said. Arguments are uncomfortable, but silence is worse.