Habibi (23 page)

“Where is your mother?”

“I don’t know! I thought she might be here. How bad is Khaled? Which hospital is he in?”

Poppy thought Khaled’s leg wound would not kill him. “It was low down. I hope they wrapped it before he bled much. The soldiers whisked me away so I couldn’t even help him! I kept telling them I was a doctor! I said, “Since when do you arrest doctors on the scene of an injury?” But they wouldn’t listen to me. Oh, it certainly was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I know you hate that phrase.” He shook his head. “I just keep thinking how we used to carve faces into acorns with our pocket knives. We would stick broken matches into them and spin them on the ground like tops. Now look where we are!” He waved his hand back and forth as if to indicate he was speaking about all the prisoners on the hall. And the soldiers too.

“But Poppy, what was
happening
at the camp in the first place?” Liyana asked.

He said, “
Habibti,
if I wanted to talk about first places, I’d have to go too far back. What was happening today was the bomb in the Jewish marketplace—did you hear about the bomb?—near a
school, which is terrible. The soldiers got a tip that someone in Khaled’s camp had something to do with it. That’s why they came into territory they’re not supposed to be administering anymore. Maybe they thought Khaled did it! But we
know
how much Khaled hates violence….How could I stand by saying nothing? He’s not a bathtub, for God’s sake….”

The soldier stepped forward roughly, motioning that he was ready to escort Liyana out, but she held her hand up and said sternly, “WAIT.” Poppy opened his dark eyes very wide. He raised his eyebrows. “Liyana, go!” he ordered. “Get out of here!”

The man in the next cell was praying loudly.

“Poppy,
we love you!
” she said, clinging to the bars with both hands by now. She could have thrown herself down on the ground like a little girl having a tantrum. But she held back, held tightly, saying only, “This is not
right
.”

Poppy placed two fingers on his lips and blew a kiss at her. “Don’t tell Sitti!” he said. “Promise me! She’ll stage a revolution! Take care,
habibti!
And where’s Rafik?” he shouted, as the guard marched her off.

“Outside! They wouldn’t let him in!”

Liyana reclaimed her purse from the office and asked the soldier if he knew where her mother
might be, but he pretended he didn’t understand her.

Before jumping back into the waiting taxi with Rafik and Khaled’s cousin, who both looked deeply curious about what had just happened inside the jail, Liyana stared hard into the face of the soldier who had escorted her. He was sitting on his crate again. She didn’t blink. She wanted to see him clearly.

Then she stared into the faces of the other two soldiers guarding the prison door. They leaned into the wall, huge guns slung over their shoulders. They could have been handsome if they had smiled. She couldn’t stop herself. Pointing at them with the forefingers of both her hands, she said loudly, “You do not have to be so mean! You could be nicer! My father is a doctor! My friend you shot is a gentle person! YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!”

The soldiers didn’t say anything. But they looked surprised.

At the tall white hospital, which reeked of ammonia, but still smelled better than the jail, Liyana, Rafik, and Khaled’s cousin were admitted to see Khaled without any trouble. Liyana and Rafik said they were his cousins, too. They let the true cousin do the talking until they got inside.

Khaled was still down in Emergency on a thin
little bed with his leg wrapped as tightly as a stuffed grape leaf. His mother sat beside him wringing water out of a washcloth. She was bathing his face. Khaled looked surprised to see his visitors and lifted partway up on his elbows.

“What!” he said weakly. “You find me! I am worried about your father! Where is he?”

A nurse refreshed a water glass beside Khaled’s bed. She stared at his guests, then left. Khaled said he’d heard about the bomb on the radio and felt very sad. Then he said, “You know I know nothing else about it.”

“We know.”

Rafik stared at Liyana.
She
knew. He didn’t know. He hated being cut out of things. Liyana said they’d both seen Nadine, who was very upset. She said Poppy was acting fairly calm behind bars. Khaled shook his head. “He was good to me. He tried to stop them. He hates fighting, too. He told me that when we came home from the Dead Sea. I can’t believe they took him!”

“Doesn’t this make you feel
more
like fighting?” Liyana asked.

Khaled sighed heavily, stretching his upper body as if his neck were stiff. He seemed very tired. “Believe me, I feel less. Ohhhhh…” He closed his eyes and sighed. “Did you know—it’s my birthday?”

“NO!” Liyana and Rafik spoke together. “Is it really?”

Rafik shook his head soberly. “I’m starting to think birthdays are bad luck.”

A black-and-white clock on the wall said six. The fragrance of cooking rice wafted down the hospital hall. At least
some
things still felt normal.

As they exited the hospital, Rafik said, “
Now
where are we going?”

Liyana whispered, “Home.”

She liked how the taxi driver waited wherever they asked him to. He was idling in front of the hospital. He knew they were having an upsetting day. In the car heading north, Rafik said, “Tell me every one of Poppy’s words. Did he look scared? Did they have chains in there?”

Liyana said, “I didn’t see chains,” but Khaled’s cousin, the one who had been in jail himself, said, “Believe me, they have everything.”

It seemed strange to find their house sitting calmly where it always sat, lights in the first-floor windows and the upstairs dark. Their car was still parked outside, too. But their mother wasn’t back yet. She rang them up from police headquarters in Jerusalem soon after they had entered the house and flicked on lights in every room.

“I have good news,” she reported, brightly. “They say your father will be released tonight. I haven’t seen him. I’ve been filling out papers in ten offices. This is the worst day of my life, but it will have a happy ending! Have you been home all afternoon?”

Liyana went downstairs to ask Abu Janan more about the bomb in the market. He shook his head. “People dead.” Old men and women. Innocent, everyday people who had as much to do with politics as Liyana did. Shopping bags. Corn. Purses. Stockings. Shoes. Kleenex. Teeth. Earrings.

How could anyone do that?
Liyana thought. Maybe it was done by the Arab father whose ten-year-old son was shot by Israeli soldiers last week. Maybe it was done by the brothers of the tortured prisoners Poppy met all the time, or the cousin of the mayor who lost both legs when the Israelis blew up his car. Did people who committed acts of violence think their victims and their victims’ relatives would just
forget?

Didn’t people see?
How violence went on and on like a terrible wheel? Could you stand in front of a wheel to make it stop? What if Khaled had been killed when he was shot? Would that have made Liyana or Nadine do something violent, too? It
was better, as happened with Khaled’s own grandparents and himself, if you were able to let the violence stop when it got to you. But many people couldn’t do that.

The telephone rang in their apartment again and Rafik raced up the stairs to get it. “It’s for you!” he shouted down to Liyana.

Her feet felt leaden on the stairs.

“Poetry reading?” Omer’s voice said.

Liyana had forgotten completely.

Maybe peace was the size of a teacup.

“Jail,”
said Poppy soberly, settling himself on the couch with a large glass of water and tipping his head back, “is an experience I don’t ever want to have again.” He’d come home from jail at 11
P.M.
in a taxi and the driver refused to take a cent from him.

Liyana, Rafik, and their mother were shocked when Sitti climbed out of the taxi after him. Where did
she
come from? Rafik and Liyana jumped up and down. “Poppy’s home! Poppy’s free!” He hugged them so tightly, Liyana felt surprised.

Sitti had appeared at the jail a few hours after Liyana did. The soldiers wouldn’t let her in, though. As Poppy was being released, he found her outside shouting, waving a broom, and demanding to see the governor. “She still thinks it’s fifty years ago,” he said, shaking his head. “We had someone called a governor then.” An old lady she knew at Khaled’s camp had called Sitti’s village to tell about Poppy being arrested.

Poppy said, “You can’t keep any secrets over here.”

A few nights later the Abbouds were eating cabbage rolls at the dinner table—Mom made Liyana a small casserole of vegetarian ones on the side, filled with nuts and raisins and rice—and everything was almost back to normal. Khaled was back at the camp with a heavily bandaged leg and a crutch. The Abbouds had been down to welcome him with molasses cookies that afternoon. Sitti had carried her broom home to its corner.

But Poppy seemed a little odd. He’d taken a few days off from work and kept sitting at the dining table scribbling notes and staring into space. He made an unusual number of phone calls and spoke only in Arabic. One day their mother reported he wore his pajama top till noon—something he
never
did.