Habibi (25 page)

She pointed at her own chest and said, “I never lost my peace inside.”

Her father always told them the Arabs were famous for their hospitality.

Finally one day when Poppy was in an especially good mood because a new wing at the hospital had just been completed and his dear old patients got to move into better rooms, he said to Liyana, “Okay, why don’t you invite your friends? We’ll go out to the village next Saturday as usual. The Jews and Arabs are talking better over in Hebron for a change. Maybe it’s a good time for—your friend—to come along. And I’d like to get Khaled and Nadine out of that camp for a day.”

On Saturday, Liyana kept watching from the balcony till the lumbering bus that carried Omer appeared on the hill. She ran out to meet him. He waved happily. He said he’d liked the bus trip north, which he’d never taken before. “Not understanding all the talk around me, but just picking up bits and pieces, made me feel—free.”

“I guess I should be feeling free all the time, then.”

Liyana’s mother walked daintily down the
steps with her hand extended. “Hello again!” she said to Omer. She was wearing her pink embroidered Mexican blouse, which she usually wore on birthdays and holidays. Liyana had even dressed up in a maroon velvet vest.

Poppy was in the bathroom when they went upstairs, “shaving,” Mom said. Liyana guessed he was really hiding out. “We’ll be going to the village as soon as he’s ready.”

Rafik lay on his bed reading a recently arrived tome of Star Trek wisdom, the Vulcan dictionary. One of his strange extraterrestrial friends in the U.S. had sent it to him. Rafik told Omer, “It took a month for it to arrive surface mail, which means it came on a ship. Liyana says it was obviously not a spaceship.”

Rafik mumbled some gobbledygook to Omer that probably meant “comrade.” Then he stood up, extended his hand normally, and asked in English if Omer would like to play catch until they left.

When Poppy emerged from the bathroom, his skin looked raw. He came toward Omer with his hand out, a little too jauntily, and said, “Let’s hit the road!” Liyana thought he looked at Omer curiously, in a good way. They picked up Khaled and Nadine at the camp. Nadine had a bundle of
za’tar
breads wrapped in a cloth for Sitti from her mother.

Driving up to the village, Rafik and Nadine, who were smallest in size, huddled on the floor of the back seat, laughing. Liyana was tucked into the center of the seat between Khaled and Omer. Today she didn’t mind at all that they were crowded. She even liked the curves more than usual, when they made her lean in Omer’s direction.

Poppy stopped at three different shops to pick up newspapers, bottled water, tins of apricot juice, a stack of two dozen pita breads, a bulging sack of fresh oranges, some with leaves still attached, and a special kind of white cheese. “Keep going, already!” Liyana’s mother said. “The car is stuffed!”

Liyana thought Poppy was trying to stall.

As their car careened past a concrete Jewish settlement with its enclosures of barbed-wire fencing and military tower, Omer craned his neck to stare out the window and spoke soberly. “I have never before seen this part of the West Bank. I always wanted to see it.”

He stared out at stony orchard terraces and banks of olive trees. Deep pools of shade. Cradled valleys. Flocks of stone-colored sheep. Poppy kept taking full breaths at the wheel, as if he were hyperventilating. Khaled had his face pressed to the window. Omer said, “These lands don’t seem
abandoned. The villages look very old. I
knew
it wasn’t true.”

Poppy said, “Who says they are abandoned?”

Omer said, “People—say.”

Then Poppy asked Omer, “What do your friends think about the West Bank?”

Khaled looked at him. Omer stared and stared out the window. He said, “They feel—scared. They—don’t know. They never came here. They think it is a different world.”

There was a long silence in which Poppy echoed him, whispering, “Different world?” He didn’t sound mad about it.

“I never imagined it—so beautiful over here,” Omer whispered.

Liyana tapped her mother on the shoulder, speaking softly. “Remember? That’s just what we said!”

Rank whispered, “Are we in a spy zone or something? Why is everybody whispering?”

Liyana’s hand brushed Omer’s on the seat. He gave it a little squeeze.

Poppy changed the subject. “Has Liyana ever told you about when I met the actor Omar Sharif?”

Omer said, “Yes, but you could tell me again.” Poppy laughed. He was loosening up.

In the village, the almond trees around Sitti’s house had burst wide open with fragrant white blossoms. They hadn’t been blooming the week before. Everyone breathed deeply and stretched as they stepped out of the car.

Swirls of children appeared around them. They carried blue marbles, rattles in an old tin can. Their faces hoped,
did you bring us anything? Gum, candies, what, what, what?
The only cow in town, hidden within a neighbor’s courtyard, let out a loud
Moooooooo
.

Omer said, “Even the cows welcome you?”

“Of course!” Liyana said, and Poppy laughed.

Poppy pulled a handful of clinky loose change from his pocket and dropped it on the ground in front of three boys. “Oh-oh!” he shrugged, teasing them in Arabic. “Take it, take it!”

Rafik produced a pack of Chiclet chewing gum and peeled the wrapper back. He held out the box. Omer startled Liyana by pulling a plastic sack of orange balloons from the backpack he carried.

“What else do you have in there?” she asked.

He tipped his head and looked secretive. “Slowly!” he told her.

Around their heads, in the sweetness of a breeze
that already smelled of summer, a dozen children blew up their blazing orange bananas and planets. They huffed and giggled. Some had almost no air in their little lungs at all. Khaled helped them. Sitti stepped from her stone courtyard flapping her hands. She hated it when people stood around outside. She wanted them inside, sitting down. Sometimes the village felt like a kingdom with Sitti as the queen.

They stepped carefully over the crooked threshold of Sitti’s house. Liyana liked watching Omer notice things. When his eyes fell on her own second-grade school picture with two missing front teeth poked into the corner of Sitti’s picture frame, he pointed and made a question mark with his hand.
You?
She grinned. Balloons were bumping and plummeting against the ceiling as children batted them high.

Dareen, Liyana’s second cousin ten times removed, appeared with a huge bouquet of mint. Omer stuck his face into it as she passed and she laughed. She was shy.

“I like
n’an’a,
” he said, using the Arabic word for mint, which startled Liyana.

“You know some Arabic?”

He turned his finger in the air. “Language is one tiny shiny key!”

She felt a sudden regret—she didn’t know
anything in Hebrew yet. “All I know is
shalom
.”

“That’s a beginning,” Omer said. Liyana thought how both Hebrew and Arabic came from such a deep, related place in the throat. English felt skinny beside them.

But if she tried to take on one more language, she thought, she might explode—like the almond trees with their billowy blossoms.

Sitti kissed Nadine and Khaled on both cheeks and leaned down to place her hand gently on Khaled’s leg. She said a blessing over it. Then she shook Omer’s hand, putting her face very close to his to stare at him. Moments later, she spilled her high-pitched siren again. Was she
that
glad to see them? Flapping her fabulous tongue way back in her mouth, she wailed and trilled.

Liyana said, “I couldn’t make that sound for a hundred sheckels,” and Omer clapped his hands. “I saw it in an Arab movie once! It’s like the tongue is trying to fly!”

Liyana, Rafik, and their three friends decided to hike around the village. They walked slowly because Khaled was still limping, passing the post office and climbing among the cemetery with its unmarked graves. Poppy’s father’s bones lay somewhere in there. Maybe he was dust. They
walked among the lentil fields to a mysterious mounded shrine encircled by large smooth stones. They all stooped and looked. Prayer rugs were rolled against one wall. A circle of half-burned candles in blackened glasses filled a corner. Nadine and Rafik crawled inside. Khaled sat on a stone to rest.

Liyana plucked the feathered head from a weed. “Omer, how old were you when your father died?”

“Five.”

“How did he die?”

“A car accident.”

“Do you remember him?”

“He’s—cloudy in my mind.” He paused. Then he spoke again, staring at Khaled. “My father did not think Arabs and Jews could ever get together again. My mother says that, too, when she reads the news. She’s pretty upset today. That I came here. My father thought our break was—really broken.”

Khaled looked off across the valley. “It’s a bad story.”

Liyana said, “That’s why we need to write a
better
one.”

Far away, a single donkey brayed. The note resounded through the valley.

Omer ran his hand through his hair and
continued, “Sometimes I try to think of my father’s eyes still in the world, looking. What did he see? He needed to see more!”

Khaled said, “We all need to see more.”

They were quiet, suspended in yellow light that falls onto hills when no one is watching.

Then Rafik broke the spell, galloping down the road toward the spring where he and Omer scooped cold water straight into their palms. They splashed their own faces. They splashed each other’s faces. Liyana walked behind more slowly with Khaled and Nadine. They seemed a little sad. Khaled said, “We wish our family lived up
here
.”

Later everyone washed their hands and sat on floor cushions in the big family circle as platters of steaming food traveled around. They scooped mounds of rice and cauliflower onto plates and Omer asked questions through Poppy. He wanted to know people’s jobs, how they were connected. Poppy said, “Don’t get started! They’re
all
connected!”

Liyana whispered to Poppy, “Who do they think he is?”

Poppy whispered back, “Who knows? Maybe they think he’s our next-door neighbor from St.
Louis, since he’s only speaking English. I just said he was our friend.”