Habibi Read online

  Rifles blasted. Stone houses were blown up. They were old houses, too, the kind you think should stand forever. My father’s best Arab friend of his whole childhood was killed next to him on a bench when they were both just sitting there. He won’t talk about it. My mother told me. My father remembers church bells ringing before that moment. Because of this, church bells have always made him nervous.

  Everyone in my father’s family prayed for the troubles to be solved. Probably the Jewish and Greek families were doing exactly the same thing. They held candlelight vigils in the streets. They carried large pictures of loved ones who had died. Everybody prayed that Jerusalem would have peace.

  One night, when gunfire exploded near their house, Sitti, my grandmother, cried out to my father and his brothers, “Help! What should we do?”

  My father said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m covering my head.”

  And he did.

  He says he just wasn’t interested infighting. He was applying for scholarships so he could get out of that mess. Sometimes he still feels guilty, like he ran away when there was trouble, but other times he’s glad he left when he did. He always hoped to go back someday.

  During those bad troubles, my father’s family traveled north to a small village to stay with relatives. Sitti was too scared to stay home. Weeks later, they returned to Jerusalem to find their house “occupied”—filled with other people—Jewish soldiers with guns. Later the “Occupied Territories” indicated Palestinian lands that were seized by Israelis, so “occupied?” became a nasty word.

  My father’s family went back to the village and moved into a big old house there, but they lost all the things inside their Jerusalem house. They lost their furniture and their dishes and their blankets and never got anything back. The Jewish soldiers with guns wouldn’t let them. The bank wouldn’t give them their money either. So it was really hard.

  I don’t understand how these things happen, personally. I’m just telling you what my father told me.

  Other Palestinians ended up crowded together in refugee camps, which still exist today. They lived in little shacks, thinking they would be there only a short time. Unfortunately that wasn’t true.

  My father got his scholarship to study medicine in the United States and his family was not happy. They didn’t want him to leave. He promised he would come back someday. It was hard for him to watch the evening news all these years. Sometimes the Middle East segments show people he knows. In medical school, he specialized in the care of old people because young people were too mixed up. Maybe he should have become a vet.

  Then he met my mother, an American, which is why he stayed over here so long. Stories of the American Indians made my father very sad. He knew how they felt.

  Only recently he grew hopeful about Jerusalem and his country again. Things started changing for the better. Palestinians had public voices again. Of course they never stopped having private voices. That’s something you can’t take away from people. My father says, wouldn’t you think the Jews, because of the tragedies they went through in Europe themselves, would have remembered this? Some did. But they weren’t always the powerful ones.

  The Arabs ana Jews shook hands again, at the White House and in lots of other places, too. Many of them had never stopped doing it, secretly. Of course some people believed in the peace process more than others. Can you imagine why anyone would not? I can’t.

  That’s when my father began planning for us to move back. He wants us to know our relatives. He wants to be in his old country as it turns into a better country. If it doesn’t work out, we can always return to the United States.

  I think of it as an adventure. I will miss all of you, especially Mr. Hathaway’s pop quizzes and Clay ton’s fascinating monologues about mummies. If I become one, I hope you all will be fortunate enough to dig me up.

  P.S. to Mr. Hathaway—that last part was just a Joke.

  Liyana Abboud

  PALS

  Are dreams thinner at thirty-three thousand feet?

  When their plane landed at Tel Aviv, Poppy was talking so fast, Liyana couldn’t pay close attention to details. Normally she liked to notice trees first—their leaves and shapes—when she arrived in a new place. Then she’d focus on plants, signs, and, gradually, people. Liyana believed in working up to people. But Poppy leaned across the aisle jabbering so fast, she could barely notice the color of the sky.

  “When we go through the checkpoint for passports, let me do the talking, okay? We don’t let them stamp our passports here. They stamp a little piece of paper instead. And don’t leave anything on the plane. Look around! Did you check under the seats? We’ll go to the hotel first and rest awhile, then we’ll call the village. My family will come in to see us. They won’t expect us to travel all the way out to visit them today. Make sure you have everything. Did you get those pistachios? What about that book Rafik was reading?”

  “Poppy’s nervous,” her mother whispered to Liyana. “He hasn’t been here in five years.”

  He was making Liyana nervous, too. Jitterbug bazooka. He didn’t like it when she said foolish words lined up, like mousetrap taffy-puller. That’s what she did inside her head when she got nervous. Poppy hadn’t told his family their exact arrival time on purpose. “They don’t need to come to the airport and make a big scene,” he said.

  Powder-puff peanut. She’d be good. She wouldn’t talk at Customs. She wouldn’t say, Yes I’m carrying my worst American habits in the zipper pouch of my suitcase and I plan to let them loose in your streets. There’s a kiss in there, too! I’ll never tell.

  Right away, the Israeli agents singled Liyana’s family out and made them stand off to the side in a troublemaker line with two men who looked like international zombies. Other travelers—sleek Spaniards, Irish nuns—zoomed right through. The women soldiers at the gate seemed meaner than the men. They all wore dull khaki uniforms. Big guns swung on straps across their backs.

  Poppy had said this singling-out treatment often happened to Palestinians, even Palestinian-Americans, but one of Poppy’s Palestinian friends had had a better arrival recently, when an Israeli customs agent actually said to him, “Welcome home.” Poppy said it depended on what good or bad thing had just happened in the news.

  Five years before, when Poppy had traveled here with his friend Mustafa, a Palestinian-American psychiatrist, the customs officer held them up so long at the gate, checking every corner of their suitcases and interrogating them so severely, that Mustafa leaned over, kissed the officer on the cheek, and said, “Let’s just be friends, okay?” The Israeli man had been so stunned to be kissed that he waved them both through. And the two of them laughed all the way to Jerusalem.

  Today the guard chose his words carefully. “Why are you planning to stay here?” Poppy had written “indefinitely” on the length of their visit when he filled out the papers on the plane. The papers were so boring. Liyana thought of more interesting questions they might ask. What’s the best word you ever made in Scrabble?

  She heard her father explain, in an unusually high-pitched tone, “I happen to be from here, and I am moving back. I have a job waiting for me at the hospital. I am introducing my family to my country and to their relatives. If you will notice, I have taken care of all the necessary paperwork at the embassy in the United States.” He jingled some coins in his pocket. Liyana worried for him. He only jingled coins when he was upset.

  The airport guards checked through their suitcases and backpacks extremely carefully. They lifted each item high in the air and stared at it. They wheeled the empty bags away on a cart to be x-rayed. They placed things back in a jumble. Liyana’s flowered raggedy underpants fell to the floor and she scooped them up, embarrassed. The guards did not care for her violin. They looked inside its sound hole and shook it, hard. They jabbered fast in Hebrew.

  Rafik tried to set his watch by a giant clock on the wall. He said, too loudly, “This airport seems ugly,” and their mother shushed him. It was t
rue. The walls were totally gray. There were no welcome posters, no murals, no candy stands. Three other stern-looking guards moved in closer to Liyana’s family. Did they think they were going to start a riot or something? The guards looked ready to jump on them. Liyana felt a knot tightening in her stomach.

  Maybe one reason their father wanted them to be quiet is they had trouble calling this country “Israel” to begin with. Why? Because Poppy had always, forever and ever, called it Palestine. Why wouldn’t he? That’s what he called it as a little boy. It was “Palestine” for the first years of his life and that’s how most Arabs still referred to it to this day. Maybe he was afraid his family would slip.

  In the airplane, somewhere over the Mediterranean, Liyana had whispered to Rafik, “Too bad the country namers couldn’t have made some awful combo word from the beginning, like Is-Pal or Pal-Is, to make everybody happy.”

  Rafik said, “Huh?”

  “But hardly anybody there has been pals yet.”

  “Are you going crazy?”

  “And Pal-Is sounds like palace—but they don’t even have a king. Do you think they would have been better off with kings?”

  Later when the guard at the customs gate pointed at Rafik and asked Liyana weirdly, “Is this your brother?” as if he might be a stranger she’d just picked up in the air, she was moved to say, “He is my pal,” and they both started giggling, which made Poppy glare at them worriedly.

  The guard sighed. He couldn’t find any reason to detain them further. He shoved the passports back at Poppy. “You may go on.”

  WELCOME

  She opened her mouth and a siren came out.

  At the hotel in Jerusalem, Liyana sat on the lumpy couch staring at her blue passport. Given name, nationality, date of birth … she turned herself upside down. She had braided her dark brown hair the day she got the picture taken. Now she wished she hadn’t. One braid was fatter than the other. She thought her large eyes looked too hopeful, like the eyes of a dog.

  Rank bounded into the room with two glasses of freshly squeezed lemonade in his hands. His long, checkered shirttail was hanging out of his pants. “You should see it down there!” he babbled excitedly. “There’s a real live sheep tied up right outside the back door of this hotel! I touched its head and it went baaa-aaa! Then I saw mysterious carving in a stone on the floor by the restaurant! It looks like a code! Was this place here when Jesus was?”

  “Goofball!” Liyana said. They downed their lemonades in three great gulps each.

  Poppy kept talking a mile a minute as they waited for Sitti and the family to appear. He unpacked his travel kit and sprayed on fresh cologne. He combed his thick hair back from his forehead and stared into a mirror, probably for the first time in weeks. Then he turned to them and placed his hands together.

  “Remember, Sitti comes from a different world. She’s very—earthy. She doesn’t wear anything but old-fashioned long clothes and she never did. She may seem strange to you. You won’t understand her. I’ll translate whatever you need, since she knows absolutely nothing in English—”

  Liyana interrupted—“As little as we know in Arabic?”—and her mother hushed her.

  Poppy continued without blinking, “They’ll want us to come out to the village tonight to eat, but look, it’s a twenty-eight-mile drive one way and it’s four P.M. already. I’ll say you’re tired from the long flight. All right? If we go to the village, a hundred people will be pouring into the house to see us. It’s too much for tonight. Is everyone okay?”

  Liyana said, “We used to be okay, till you started making us so nervous!” She whispered to Rafik, “Does he think they won’t like us? Does he think we won’t like them?”

  Rafik lay on the bed, sighing happily. He said, “Have you felt these pillows? They’re the deepest pillows in the world!”

  Liyana lay down on the next bed. Her head sank into the soft feathers and she said, “You’re right.” Then she got up again and changed from her blue corduroy pants to her pleated black skirt. She was thinking how amazing it was that people could get on an airplane and step off again in a different universe.

  After Poppy had peeked out the window twenty times at taxis veering by with honking horns and squealing tires and their mother had combed and recombed her hair, applying a new dash of perky red lipstick, everyone finally arrived. Their babbling echoes filled the lobby before they got on the elevator. Poppy stepped outside the door to greet them.

  Then a huge crowd of relatives burst into the room, bustling, hugging, pinching cheeks, and jabbering loudly. They were smoky smelling, not like cigarette smoke but the deeper smoke of a campfire that goes into clothes and stays there after the fire’s out.

  Indeed, they were not like any relatives Liyana had ever met before. In the United States their extended family (except for Peachy Helen, who always acted cozy) held back from them politely as if they might have a cold. Uncle Leo had never hugged Liyana yet. He shook her hand like an insurance man. Aunt Margaret spoke formally to children, about general subjects. Are you enjoying the summer? Do you have nice friends?

  But this bustling group of aunts and uncles swirled in circles as Sitti, their grandmother, threw her strong arms around each one of them in succession, squeezing so tightly that Liyana lost her breath. “She’s blessing you,” Poppy whispered.

  Liyana had an impulse to stand very close to Poppy, for protection, and also for translation, so he could keep her posted on what was being said. Tears poured down Sitti’s rugged cheeks. Suddenly she threw her head back, rolled her tongue high up in her mouth, and began trilling wildly. Liyana had never heard anything like it. Aunt Saba and Aunt Amal began clapping a rhythmic beat. Mom looked startled. Rafik raised his eyebrows.

  Poppy shook his head, waving both hands in Sitti’s face to quiet her down. “That’s her traditional cry,” he explained. “She uses it as an announcement at weddings and—funerals.”

  “Which one is this?” Liyana asked.

  Poppy spoke rapidly to Sitti in Arabic, but she didn’t stop right away. She trilled and trilled and trilled. She shimmied her arms in the air like a Pentecostal preacher. The backs of her hands were tattooed with the dark blue shapes of flying birds. Liyana said, “Poppy! You never told us she had tattoos!”

  Poppy said, “I didn’t want you to get any ideas.”

  “I’m considering an eagle, myself,” Rafik said.

  Sitti pulled Poppy’s face close to hers again and again to kiss him on both cheeks. Liyana liked that. Two kisses seemed better than one.

  Liyana was being kissed by so many people whose exact identity was unknown to her, though Poppy tried to clarify names of aunts, cousins, and wives of cousins, to help his family out. Even he had trouble. He gave two different names for the same woman and everyone laughed. Liyana kept nodding and trying to kiss people back, even when she missed their cheeks. She kissed Aunt Lena on the scarf and felt silly. Still, after all that flying, the enthusiastic welcome was nice. At least Liyana knew they had landed in the proper hemisphere.

  The women’s long dresses were made of thick fabrics, purple, gold, and navy blue, and stitched brightly with fabulous, complicated embroidery. Aunt Lena had rich lines of multicolored rainbow thread wrapped around her wrists. All the women wore gold bangle bracelets. The older ones had long white scarves draped and knotted firmly over their hair. The younger ones had bare heads, which made Liyana feel relieved.

  They wore plastic, slip-on shoes in pastel colors. The modern shoes seemed strange with their old-fashioned clothes. Aunt Saba touched Liyana’s blue-and-yellow Swiss children’s watch that had little people’s heads on the ends of its hands. She put her face down to stare at it and laughed. The women even touched Liyana’s earlobes. She wore no gold earrings, as they did. But Liyana didn’t mind. She didn’t feel like a “specimen.” She liked their curiosity. The men wore dull gray or black suits, white shirts, and striped ties, more like men anywhere. Liyana wondered how men ever got such boring uniforms, anyway.
Sometimes she looked at encyclopedia pages showing “native dress” styles from around the world. Elsewhere, in Zambia maybe, or Timbuktu, the men knew how to dress. In the older days, Arab men wore long, flowing robes and cloaks with golden edges, but suits had sneaked into their closets now. Poppy had told Liyana she would like the men’s elegant clothing in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates better.

  Two of the older uncles, Zaki and Daoud, wore black-and-white-checkered kaffyehs on their heads, which made them look more interesting. Liyana liked their weather-beaten brown faces immediately. Rafik was tugging at her elbow. He whispered, “Does that mean his name is Daoud Abboud?”

  Liyana said, “I think he’s married to one of our aunts. He must have a different last name. But let’s not find out what it is right now, okay? My head is spinning!”

  Poppy translated what Aunt Amal said, about how scary it had been for them to pass the Israeli checkpoint when they entered Jerusalem. Her face looked alarmed. All four taxis filled with family members had been stopped. They’d been asked to show special permits they had secured two days ago. The Israeli soldier shouted at them and they got scared. He had a gun. He threw Uncle Daoud’s pass on the ground because it was slightly bent and made him get out of the car to pick it up. When he was done looking at the passes, Sitti thought he said, “Go away,” but he meant, “Go on.”

  Liyana noticed her mother’s face turning worried as Poppy translated. Her mother fingered the edge of Sitti’s sleeve. “What?” Liyana asked her. “What are you thinking of?”

  “I thought things were supposed to be much better now.”

  “That’s not what they’re telling me,” Poppy said. “They say the rules change every two days. And they almost never come into the city anymore.”