Habibi (11 page)

“She,”
Rafik said. “She is—girl bird.” Liyana couldn’t imagine being technical at a moment like this. She felt so relieved to see the wayward chicken again that she put her hand out enthusiastically to shake the boy’s free hand.

“Ana Liyana,”
she said, using the Arabic phrase for “I am Liyana” that pleased her, since it echoed so neatly.

The boy said,
“Ana Khaled.”

Rafik said,
“Ana Rafik”

“You speak—Arabic?” Khaled asked.

Rafik answered, “Not yet. You speak English?”

Khaled said, “Maybe.”

Liyana and Rafik laughed. Rafik asked, “What’s
maybe
in Arabic?”

“Yimkin.”

A younger girl with puffy red curls similar to Khaled’s ran up to them. She wore a loose pair of pants that looked like bloomers, and a pink T-shirt with Donald Duck on it. Khaled said, “This—Nadine. My—brother.”

“No—your sister!” said Rafik.

The chicken was trying hard to get away again. One taste of freedom had inspired it. Khaled seemed happy to hand it to Liyana.

“You—tourist?”

“No,” Liyana said. “We live in that house.” She pointed up the road. “Can you come over sometime and visit us?”

Khaled looked at his sister, who looked hopeful. “You are—
Araby?
”

This gave Liyana a chance to say her favorite new Arabic phrase.
“Nos-nos.”
Which meant, half-half. Somehow it sounded better in Arabic.

Khaled and Nadine liked this a lot. They walked up the road with them, reaching over to pet the chicken as they went.

At the back gate to the house, they all shook
hands and laughed again. Nadine and Khaled pointed at the other chickens flapping around the yard and said,
“Alham’dul-Allah!”
which meant, Praise be to God!, and which Arab people used for nearly everything.

“Come back!” Rafik said to them. “Come over soon!”

After Liyana and Rafik had caught the rest of the chickens with great difficulty and latched them inside their pen, they dissolved in a flurry of giggles just as Imm Janan stepped off the bus out front with her loaded shopping bags. Liyana said to Rafik, “Khaled and Nadine. They’re nice. Now you tell me. Are they acquaintances or friends?”

Her mountain of notebooks hid under four folded black sweaters.

Since his childhood, Poppy had been wishing for a hat that would make him invisible.

Where would he go if he had one? Where would he travel?

“I would travel in and out of the rooms where big decisions are made,” he said very seriously. “I would listen to things people say when they think no outsider is listening. When they make decisions that will affect other people. I would be their conscience, tugging at them quietly. And there would have been peace in Jerusalem long ago.”

Rafik said, “I would be like Superman. I would fight crime and evil forces and no one would even see me.”

“It’s a hat,” Liyana told him. “It’s not wings.”

Their mother got all dreamy when Poppy said, “
You
put the hat on now—where will you go?” She would sit at the feet of great musicians and opera singers as they practiced. She would soak up their trills and scales, their perfect pitches. Or she
would ride around in Mother Teresa’s pocket. She would shadow great saints and learn how to do selfless things for the world.

“Mom,” Liyana said. “You’re doing that already.”

“No,” she said, smiling. “I’m only doing it for you. I could do more.”

What would Liyana do? She’d pop that invisible hat on her head, go to the airport, and get on a plane headed back to the United States. She would sit in First Class. She would curl up on somebody’s food tray with the real silverware and the china plates.

Rafik said, “Let’s hope the hat has shrinking powers, too, and makes you tiny, the size of a salt shaker. Otherwise that tray’s going to
tip
.”

Later Liyana would float around their old neighborhood, invisible as tree pollen, and see if anyone mentioned her.

Maybe she was completely forgotten.

She would drift in through Mrs. Mannino’s window and hang suspended over the kitchen sink while she washed dishes. Liyana still remembered what Mrs. Mannino’s coffee cups looked like, white with painted shafts of wheat tied together. She and Claire and Kelly Mannino drank spiced cider out of them.

She would fly into Peachy Helen’s bedroom
where Peachy was buttoning her satiny housecoat, and whisper, “Lavender’s blue, dilly-dilly, lavender’s green.” She’d click her invisible fingers, reciting rhymes Peachy taught her when she was very little. “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick.” Where was Jack now?

Was his candle all burned out?

I will speak the language of animals and wipe their blood from my teeth.

One day, when Poppy had taken the bus to work so Mrs. Abboud could pick up Rafik after soccer practice, Liyana rode along and they stopped first at a butcher shop to buy chicken for dinner. It was the first time Liyana had entered one here. She followed her mother into the stinky store crowded with stacked shelves of crooked stick and wire cages.

The chickens in the cages were alive and cramped, jabbering, in their boxy prisons. They were not headless body parts on Styrofoam plates wrapped neatly in anonymous plastic in a refrigerated grocery compartment. They were not thighs, drumsticks, and breasts.

Downy feathers from their soft chests stuck between the bars of the cages. Liyana pulled a feather free and smoothed her finger over it. The chickens were breathing, chattering, humming. They were
looking at her. At each other.
And lifting their wings.

Her mother took a deep breath and said,
“Wahad, min-fadlack.” One, please.
Poppy had taught her the necessary phrases to get through a day. She seemed to be avoiding eye contact with the chickens herself. The butcher would let you pick your own chicken if you wanted to, but Liyana’s mother didn’t.

Turning her back on the scene, Mom stared into the street as the butcher plunged his hand into a cage toward one very upset white chicken. Liyana didn’t want to see any of it either, but she couldn’t stop looking. He grabbed it roughly by its legs and it screamed. Then he swung it abruptly, upside down, so it went into shock and dangled limply a moment before he plopped it onto his bloody counter, grabbed the big knife, and slashed off its head.

Liyana couldn’t help herself. “No!” She waved her arm as if to slap him.

Her mother gripped her shoulder. “Oh, stop.”

Liyana’s eyes filled up.

She had eaten chicken hundreds of times, but she had never witnessed this scene before. She thought,
It happens over and over and over.

The chicken’s body trembled and writhed after the head was severed, then fell still. The butcher turned to plunge the body into a steaming pot, then deftly stripped the feathers off, wrapping the body in white paper.

Did Liyana just imagine the other chickens grew much quieter for a moment? That a sheen of horror hung in the air? Each time a new person stepped into the shop, the chickens must worry.

My turn.

People might say chickens couldn’t worry, but something sensitive in their bodies must know.

At that moment, full of the rotten stench of the shop, Liyana’s poor mother handing her money over to the butcher, not liking it either but saying
“Shookran,”
in a tight voice, Liyana became a vegetarian.

Her mother cooked the chicken’s body with tarragon leaves that had traveled in a plastic bag all the way from St. Louis. She served the chicken’s body over rice. Liyana took only rice.

“Why aren’t you eating any?” Poppy asked.

Rafik shouted, “Liyana’s on a diet! Someone told her she has pudgy cheeks!”

Liyana held her fork straight up like a scepter. “It’s dead,” she announced loudly. “And it didn’t want to die.”

My sister is a very unusual person and I don’t think she would mind to hear me call her that. She loves to read and walks around talking to herself. Or she can stay quiet for a really long time staring at something like an egg.

She has a very primitive hairdo and wears mostly the same three shirts and blue jeans or one skirt over and over. She says she will never cut her hair or wear makeup in her life and if I paid her one hundred dollars she wouldn’t paint her fingernails red. Actually she looks younger than she is, which is almost fifteen.

She doesn’t need lots of things to make her happy. In fact, money is one of her least favorite subjects. She says one thing she fears about growing older is that she will have to think about money and she doesn’t want to. I told her I would be her banker. Personally I like to think a lot about cars, what features they offer and what they cost, but my sister will only talk about where they GO. She doesn’t want to know anything else. I’m also better on the computer than she is, but we don’t have one over here yet. Our father sold it when we moved. My sister does not want to know any of the fancy programs, she only wants to know HOW TO TYPE.

My sister and I don’t fight much, but sometimes she gets mad at me like when we were still in St. Louis and I found this list she made called “Against Growing Up” that included things like “They forget what it felt like to see a rabbit for the first time” and “They are always busy and sticking to schedules.” I stuck it on the refrigerator with a magnet where both our parents read it. They thought she meant them.

I probably shouldn’t even talk about it now.

Rafik Abboud

I wish I could press my mind as flat and smooth as I press my shirt.

“People talk about their first day of school or their last day, but they never talk about their twenty-ninth day,” Liyana said to Rafik. They were sitting on the short wall in the backyard cracking pumpkin seeds between their teeth, tossing shells into the lilies.

Liyana had been counting. Her twenty-nine-day Armenian friends acted very kind to her. They seemed genuinely glad she was among them, as if grateful for a newcomer to liven things up. They liked it when she mimicked popular songs from the radio in the schoolyard. Liyana had never been shy to sing in front of people. Why was singing any more embarrassing than talking was?

She’d learned they were supposed to stand formally when a teacher entered the classroom. She tried clicking her heels together, like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
. She learned that Armenian boys are dashing and have a mischievous glint in their
eyes. A boy named Kevork said, “We heard Americans are wild. Are you wild?”

By the twenty-ninth day, Liyana’s papers had proper headings, and her navy blue uniform had lost its bright gleam, its sharp pleat. She kept her silver ring in her pocket and slipped it on every day as she left school. On the twenty-ninth day, she forgot to remove it in the morning and the “directress” snapped at her as the girls stood in line for their “daily checkup.”

On the twenty-ninth morning, the teacher called roll by last names only: Hagobian, Melosian, Tembeckjian, Yazarian, Zakarian. Liyana was last—
Abboud
—even though alphabetically she should have been first. She was the P.S. in the roll book. Her new friends added “ian” to her name to tease her.

On the twenty-ninth morning, her class discussed the isosceles triangle as if it had just been invented. Babgen Bannayan got in trouble for not bringing in his history research on the Colossus of Rhodes for the third day in a row.

Mr. Bedrosian, the English teacher (though he liked his students to call him a “professor” as if they were in college), wore his gray suit, the only suit he seemed to have besides his black one. Small threads dangled from the hem and the buttons. He could use some mending. He spoke
about William Blake and John Keats with
veneration
in his voice, though Liyana wished he would pick somebody a little more modern to talk about soon. Liyana wondered if he lived alone.

On the twenty-ninth day a funeral procession passed slowly beneath the open classroom windows. The students heard the low voices of the mourners growing louder and louder as they approached. Liyana didn’t realize what the sound was at first since she’d never heard it before. Everyone in the classroom was silently reading. She stood to look out the windows and stared right down into the face of the first dead person she’d ever seen.

A woman’s petite body wrapped in white was being carried in an open coffin high above the heads of the mourners. Her head looked small, precise, with pale wavy hair and closed eyes in purplish skin. Liyana felt magnetized. Had the dead woman studied geometry? Did she have a happy life?

Mr. Bedrosian said, “You will please take your seat, Miss Abboud.”

By the twenty-ninth day, Liyana knew exactly where to go for lunch, either out into the sunny walled courtyard to buy sesame bread from the vendor with the huge tray on his head—she ate it with hard-boiled eggs and cheese and apples—or
home with her new friends to eat their mothers’ folded spinach pies. Here, in the slowest country on earth, the students had a whole hour-and-a-half lunch break.