Habibi (9 page)

Rafik lit a stick of incense and wandered back and forth in the hall as if conducting a ritual. When
Poppy finally appeared, he sat with the woman and they talked a long time. She kept gesturing with her hands, but she didn’t look upset.

In the kitchen Liyana washed spinach. Rafik had recently started cutting up onions, which their mother said was a great help to her. “That really irritates me,” Liyana muttered, “that he does
one little thing
and you act so grateful. I do things every day!”

Poppy stepped in, shaking his head. “The woman’s a mystery,” he said. “I think she’s a cousin of a cousin of a cousin who died before I was born and no one ever remembered to tell me about him. She lives in that little village on the lip of the mountain before you get to Nablus. I’ve hardly spent any time there, so I don’t know any of the people she keeps mentioning.”

“What does she want?”

“She wants me to buy her a dress.”

“What?”

“It’s an old custom. When someone returns from America, they buy every woman relative a bolt of cloth, for making a new dress. I guess it’s to signify the success the traveler has had in America.”

Liyana thought about the ten thousand relatives she’d met already.

“Everyone? Buy
everyone dresses
? Wouldn’t that be impossible?”

“Of course. Especially if you had to buy them for people you’d never heard of before.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to drive her as far as Ramallah, where the fabric store is, and—I’ll think of something. She can take the bus to her village from there.”

They were breathing the rich scent of grilled onions and keeping dinner warm in the oven by the time he returned. “Well?” they all spoke at once.

He grinned. “I took her to the fabric store, all right. I told her to go ahead and get out. She thought I was going to park the car and come back and pick out a huge piece of red velvet for her. But instead I drove around the block and came straight home.”

Rafik said, “You
dumped
her?”

Poppy shrugged. “The old customs have to be changed somehow, you know? Little by little. I told her I thought it was a stupid custom while we were still sitting here—but she was relentless. So—as easily as she appeared in our house, I disappeared. She’ll get over it.”

“Won’t she be mad at you?”

“Have I ever seen her before? Do I live my life
being scared of the anger of people I don’t even know? I am related to Hassan who is related to Hani who is related to Naimeh who is related to Fatwa who is related to this glass of water who is related to the river Jordan who is related to John the Baptist—come on!”

I’m the snip of red thread caught on a twig.

Maybe the hardest thing about moving overseas was being in a place where no one but your own family had any memory of you. It was like putting yourself back together with little pieces.

At home in St. Louis even the man at the grocery store remembered the day a very young Liyana poked a ripe peach too hard and her finger went inside it. She shrieked and the neighborhood ladies buying vegetables laughed. Forever after when she came into his store, the grocer would say, “Be careful with my plums! Don’t get too close to my melons!”

It was a little thing, of course, but it helped her be
somebody
.

In Jerusalem she was just a blur going by in the streets. The half-American with the Arab eyes in the navy blue Armenian school uniform. Who?

Water came from the earth and stories sprang from the stones.

Sitti kept Liyana’s bed in the village ready, the pillow puffed. She pointed it out each time the Abbouds arrived for their regular weekend visit, but Liyana turned her face away. Why was it such a
big deal?
Sitti stroked her face saying,
“Ya Habibi, Habibti,”
cackling like a giddy munchkin.

But one Saturday morning, Liyana felt ready, as if a compass had swung round inside her and held. “I’ll stay at the village,” she said. She told Poppy and her mother that they could return on Sunday night and pick her up.

They’d be there all Saturday afternoon themselves, as usual, which relieved Liyana. If Poppy were with her, he could
explain
—who was who, what was what. It was all a guessing game without him.

Liyana put her backpack in Sitti’s corner. She had brought a collection of poems in case she had time to read, and her writing notebook, and her
small troll with rhinestone eyes. Sitti might like it. She could already tell Sitti got excited over very little things.

Rafik had disappeared with Muhammad again. Aunt Amal arrived to take Liyana’s mother out to the orchards and show her the almonds and olives ripening on the branches. They carried baskets for picking herbs—oregano and mint, sumac and thyme.

Sitti motioned Liyana and Poppy toward the mounded oven called the
taboon,
large enough to step into, beside her house. She showed Liyana how to slap bread dough into flat rounds and fling them onto a hot black stone to cook. When her long dress flapped dangerously close to the flames, Liyana stooped to pull it back, but Poppy said, “She knows what she’s doing.” Their other relatives had modern electric bread ovens now, but Sitti refused to touch them. She remained devoted to the old ways of doing things.

She pitched Liyana another ball of dough, inviting her to try it. Liyana copied her motions, kneading, slapping, and swinging the dough high in the air as she’d seen pizza makers do in Italian restaurants back home. Sitti’s loaves were perfectly round, but Liyana’s bread looked like Australia. Sitti helped her shape and reroll.

By the time the hot breads were placed on a white cotton towel on the table to cool, Poppy had
fallen asleep on top of Sitti’s bed like a boy. Sitti leaned over him for a minute, as if she were examining her baby closely. Then she whispered to Liyana and gestured that they should leave him alone. Liyana was thinking,
So much for my translator
.

But it turned out she didn’t need him so badly after all. Sitti lifted a tall clay jug onto her head and motioned Liyana to hike with her down the dirt road. They charged off into the breeze. Sitti kept glancing at Liyana’s face as if to check on her.
Was she happy? Did she like this?
Sitti waved her arm at the expansive view across the valleys and hills. She blew a kiss to the air, which helped Liyana take a deeper breath herself. Liyana could skip if she wanted to. She could twirl in a circle with her arms out to feel dizzy.

No one watched them or acted formal. Liyana felt as invisible and happy as she used to feel coasting on her bike.

They passed the telephone operator’s house and he waved at them through the open door. He had a switchboard in front of him with wires and holes, just like the switchboards in old American movies. They passed a few lone houses sitting off by themselves under gnarled trees. They passed a cemetery and Sitti turned her face away. Liyana noticed there were no words on any of the white gravestones.

Then they came to the spring, where water
gathered in a shining pool by the roadside. Sitti filled her hand and let Liyana drink from it. She’d never drunk from anybody else’s hand before. The water tasted crisp. Then Sitti filled the jug slowly from a pipe jutting out of a ledge. Poppy had said the women still preferred this fresh “earth water” to the water that came from faucets. Sitti placed a thick cloth pad on her head and heaved the full jug back up there, to carry back to the house. Once the jug was in place, she balanced it without using her hands. She motioned to Liyana.
Did Liyana want to try carrying it?
Liyana jumped back. She couldn’t even carry a peach on her head!

After delivering the water home and snapping green beans into a big pot to steam with a cinnamon stick, Sitti took Liyana to meet a neighbor who was stringing orange beads on nylon thread. The woman opened a cupboard to show Liyana dozens of lovely necklaces hanging on nails. She urged her to choose one. Liyana didn’t wear necklaces herself, but selected a turquoise one strung with antique Palestinian coins. She could hide the necklace till her mother’s birthday. The woman kept song sparrows in small wicker cages and gave Liyana two fat olive oil soaps to take home to her mother, too. She hugged Liyana good-bye.

Later Liyana realized how many things they had all communicated without trading any words.
Toward evening, when Rafik had returned sweaty from playing with his cousins in the fields and their mother had returned sunburned, happily stocked with a year’s worth of herbs and some miniature embroideries to practice on, and Poppy had awakened from his second nap, they sat together on floor cushions by Sitti’s bed cracking almonds into a wooden bowl. Liyana leaned against Sitti’s shoulder so she could reach the bowl.

Sitti kept Poppy busy translating. She related her dreams as if they were news reports, staring into Liyana’s face as Poppy spoke. “The other night I dreamed that a relative named Salim who died long ago came and asked me to accompany him to Mecca. I was so afraid. I want to go to Mecca, but not with somebody dead. I thought he would take me with him to the next world and make me die.”

But then?

“When I woke up I saw that ugly cat sitting in my window, so I knew I was still alive.”

Sitti popped two almonds into Rafik’s mouth when he laughed and then she left the room to arrange the green beans and stuffed squash they were having for dinner on big trays.

Poppy leaned toward his family and said, “You’ll notice Sitti’s stories don’t always hang
together. She has no logical sense of cause and effect. Anyway, in this part of the world, the past and present are often rolled into one.”

All the uncles were away at another village that day for a big meeting about land problems. The aunts had gone to Bethlehem to help a distant cousin prepare for her wedding. Liyana liked having fewer people around.

Poppy said he was afraid to buy Sitti a bus ticket for the pilgrimage to Mecca, because he really did think she might die soon afterward.

Why?

Sitti was back in the room by now, listening to them talk English and nodding her head. She said the squash would be cool enough to eat as soon as two birds crossed in the sky. Poppy didn’t even blink. He just kept talking.

“Sometimes when a person looks forward to something for such a long time, it keeps them alive. Then when they accomplish it—
boom
.” He studied such subjects. He said the old people he’d been seeing in the hospital here were incredibly “durable” for their advanced ages. “Lots of them are waiting for a true, independent Palestine, too. They’re not going to give up when they’re this close.”

Sitti collected the almond shells in her skirt and went outside.

Liyana kept considering what Poppy said
about hopes being accomplished.

“Like you coming back to Jerusalem, Poppy?” “I hope not.”

At the last minute Liyana begged Rafik to spend the night in the village with her. He wouldn’t care that he didn’t have a toothbrush or change of clothes. “Listen,” she hissed, “if I’m going to be out here pretending I understand what’s going on, at least you could be with me.” He agreed. He was really having fun here. The boys didn’t do as many chores as the girls did, which irritated Liyana again. She felt like ordering them to go chop wood or mulch the trees.

Their parents left them after the big delicious dinner and two rounds of hot tea with mint and sugar. Sitti said she could read their fortunes in the tea leaves in the sugary bottoms of their cups. The tea leaves had their own alphabets and conveyed messages once the tea was gone.

Liyana felt so tired and chilly she wished she could curl up like a mouse in a hole. The minute the sun went down, the temperature in the stone rooms plummeted.

Rafik and Liyana looked hard at one another as the sound of their parents’ car disappeared down the mountain. They were sleeping in the same
room with Sitti, who took many minutes to unroll her gigantic pouchy belt, which doubled as a pocket. She emptied it of coins, a few crumpled money bills, a giant key, some loose buttons, and a pink comb, lining her treasures on a table. She wore her white pajamas under her clothes so she wasn’t shy at all to slip her dress off right in front of them. Liyana took her own pajamas into the bathroom to change.