Habibi (24 page)

When Liyana asked what was going on, he said he couldn’t stop thinking about all the people who were still in jail—many for more ridiculous reasons than his own. He was becoming an activist in his old age. He was going to see the Jewish mayor of Jerusalem tomorrow. He’d heard a man coughing too hard a few cells down. The man obviously needed medicine. He put both his
hands up in the air. He walked down to the refugee camp and talked to everybody. He rolled his papers and banged them on the table. “I’m trying to figure out how many things an ordinary citizen can do!”

But at dinner he asked Liyana, “Now what are
you
thinking about? The tables are turned. You’ve been so quiet tonight.”

She dove in. “Could my friend Omer—Mom’s met him—come to the village with us someday soon? He’s never been to—an Arab village. He invited me to a poetry reading the other evening, but I wasn’t able to go, since my father was just getting out of jail—so I thought it might be nice to invite him somewhere, too.”

Poppy’s hand went up to his forehead. “Right now? Oh, Liyana. He’s curious about us? He wants to know how we do things? He likes our food?”

“You don’t have to sound so defensive!”

Poppy was silent for a moment. That’s what
he
always said to
her
. “Our family—wouldn’t appreciate it. They wouldn’t—understand. It would seem suspicious—or unsettling to them. The peace isn’t stabilized enough yet.”

“Understand? What’s there to understand about having a friend?”

“Liyana—you know. You’re just acting innocent on purpose.”

“I
don’t
know! I don’t
want
to know! What good is it to believe in peace and talk about peace if you only want to live the same old ways?”

“Is his family orthodox?”

“No. He doesn’t seem orthodox—anything. He seems very universal.”

Poppy sighed. “They always seem—universal. Do you have any passages from your favorite prophet Kahlil Gibran you’d like to read to me just now?”

Liyana’s mother tapped her water glass with a spoon. “Don’t make fun,” she said to Poppy. “Remember what my parents said when I fell in love with you? They said nothing, remember? And do you remember how cruel that was?”

Poppy reeled back in his chair. “Now she’s in love?” he thundered. “Liyana’s in love? I thought she just wanted to go to the village!”

Rafik was roaring. Liyana hated this.

“So is it okay or not?” she asked, pushing back two lonely green beans to the edge of her plate.

Poppy was quiet.

A bus roared by on the road outside.

Liyana said softly, “We want to write a new story,” and Poppy said, “What?”

Mom, queen of her Communications Club, took a deep breath. “She’s right, you know. What good is a belief in peace if it doesn’t change the ways we live?”

But Poppy wasn’t listening. “It’s
inappropriate
for a girl to invite a boy anywhere in this part of the world. They’ll think you’re engaged or something. They’ll think he’s a spy. How will I explain him?”

Rafik groaned. “Could we talk about something else? Let’s just invite him already! Who cares? Say he’s MY FRIEND, not Liyana’s! Say he’s my mentor or something—like we had in school in the United States. I met him at the library. He’s a nice guy. And Sitti invites everyone
else
on earth to our dinners—why not him, too?”

Liyana loved Rafik with all her heart.

Poppy said, “He was at the library, too?”

Then he said, “You’re
stubborn,
dear Liyana. You’re that fine Arabian horse again, constantly trying to get your own way. Why do you want to take him and not Khaled or Nadine?”

“Let’s take them as well! Let’s take everybody! Don’t you want a coming-out party? And didn’t you mention, last week, how wonderful it was when Mr. Hamadi, your favorite thousand-year-old patient, let the Jewish doctor work on his eyes and never once referred to his ethnicity? Didn’t you say before you went in jail that it would be great if people never described each other as ‘the Jew’ or ‘the Arab’ or ‘the black guy’ or ‘the white guy’—didn’t you just SAY?”

Her mother repeated, “She’s right, you know.”

After dinner, Liyana was on the phone. Omer always laughed when she identified herself with both her names. “You think I can’t tell? I told you you’re the only Liyana I know!” His rich voice rang out, a rippling stream of energy across the wire between their rooms. The minute she heard him, she wished they could talk forever.

Poppy had told Liyana they shouldn’t “set the date” for the village trip yet. He made it sound like a marriage. It would happen—“someday”—when the time felt better. When Khaled’s leg was stronger. “Don’t rush me,” Poppy said. “Don’t rush anything. Okay?”

Omer was so happy Liyana had taken his interest seriously.

But he called her back the next day, sounding downcast, just needing to talk. His mother didn’t want him to go to the village with Liyana,
ever,
but he told his mother it was very important. “Then she took a long walk,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means she’s worried. And I’m going. Just let me know when.”

Omer was leaving for two weeks with his class on an extended field trip to a kibbutz in northern
Israel. They did this every year. He wasn’t thrilled about it. He’d be picking cherries, boxing them, digging, and weeding. The thought of such a long gap till they might meet again made Liyana’s heart sputter in her throat.

She wrote for two hours that night, putting the word “heart” together with every verb she could think of. Her heart tipped, it rumbled, it swelled. She tried to write a story in which she was not the main character, in which some person she had never heard of before did things and felt things. But she still had trouble imagining lives she had not lived.

For the first time these days, she also felt like part of a sea.

When Liyana considered the echoes bouncing off the walls of Jerusalem, she felt like the dot on an
i
in an American alphabet book for babies. Nearly invisible.

When she turned a corner in the Old City, she was just a ripple of an ancient, continuing echo.
Going, going … almost gone.

“Will we ever go home?” she asked Poppy after an evening walk up to the small grocery to smell the air and buy new wooden clothespins and a box of loose tea.

Poppy was whistling, so she figured it was a good moment to ask something like that.

He paused. “I would hope,” he said, “that you felt comfortable here.”

“Oh I
do,
” she said. “I feel more comfortable every day. But I was just … wondering. Sometimes
I get incredibly homesick for …”

Then her mind went blank. What was she really homesick for? Those ugly green signs marking exits off the interstate? The sports sections of American newspapers that she never glanced at anyway? The chilled tapioca puddings in little tubs at the supermarket?

What was she really missing anymore?

Rafik told everybody he didn’t miss anything. He had too much to think about over here to waste time with missing. He also said his Arabic was developing more quickly than Liyana’s because he was less afraid of making mistakes. One day Liyana was trying to say “Excuse me” to somebody and she said something like “monkey’s heart.”

The sea. One wave running into another.
But they had lived beside the Mississippi River, not beside a sea. She used to imagine the river running southward to pour into the Gulf of Mexico she’d never visited. Now, from this great distance, she felt closer to everything than she ever had before.

She did not feel like a foreigner in the Old City anymore. Now she had her own landmarks and scenes to remember. She had Hani, the banana seller, Bilal, the fabric seller, and Bassam, the spice man. She knew where a certain stone corner
was chipped away. Maybe a vendor had bumped it with his cart long ago. She knew where the cabbages were lined on burlap in front of a radiant old woman who raised one hand to Liyana as if she were blessing her. She knew the blind shopkeeper who sat on a stool in front of his shop nodding and saying, “
Sabah-al-khair
—Good morning”—to the air. The Old City was inside her already.

“Did you ever think,” Poppy said, “that some of us might stay and some of us go back—in the future, maybe, when you and Rafik are grown? Wouldn’t it be strange if you were the one who stayed—and the rest of us moved back to the States? How can anyone know what the next day brings?”

The next day brought two good things. One, Liyana received a tiny present in the mail from Peachy Helen, a new four-inch-tall edition of Kahlil Gibran, and it was a volume she didn’t have yet. Secondly, Mr. Berberian brought up the history of the “peace talks” at school, and suggested the students ask their elders’ opinions about them.

Since Liyana’s family was going out to eat
kousa,
stuffed zucchini squash, in the village that evening, she got Poppy to ask Sitti at dinnertime.

Sitti was wrapping the cooked
kousa
in white cotton towels to keep them hot on the plate.

Sitti looked surprised. She puffed up like a dove when it ruffles its feathers.