Habibi Read online

  Rafik said, “I think the same person just kissed me for the tenth time.”

  Poppy rubbed his hands together. “We should go downstairs to get some tea or coffee.” Liyana knew he was trying to lighten the atmosphere, but a huge babble broke loose. “They aren’t used to hotels,” he explained.

  In fact, today was the first time in her life Sitti had ever ridden in an elevator. Always before, in any building with more than one floor, she insisted on taking the stairs. Sitti said little boxes were for dead people. She didn’t want to enter the elevator today, either, and they had to push her.

  Liyana noticed the women of the family eyeing her mother closely. She was an inch taller than Poppy, and her skin two shades lighter. Liyana and Rafik had inherited Poppy’s olive skin. Did they think her mother was pretty? They seemed to like her mother’s long hair. They all had long hair, too, braided, or knotted in buns. Liyana guessed the ones with scarves had long, hidden hair. Everyone must have wondered about a woman who could have kept a man from living in his own country till now. They must have had mixed feelings.

  Liyana’s mother kept smiling widely at them, placing her hands on top of theirs like in that game for babies where the bottom hand keeps getting pulled out. Beyond the window, cars and trucks of Jerusalem swerved and honked, screeching their brakes and wailing up to the curb. Rafik, peeking out the window at her side, said, “Have you noticed how many old Mercedes Benzes there are here?” Her brain swirled with names, Lena, Saba, Leila, ending in a, like her own. Would she ever get them straight?

  Suddenly, just as everyone headed out the door for a tea party, Rafik vomited on the floor.

  Mrs. Abboud rushed toward the bathroom for tissues, which were so small and thin that she threw them up in the air when she returned. What about bath towels? Awful. “Liyana,” she hissed. “Move! Help!” Poppy broke the momentary frozen spell by waving his hands to urge everyone out into the hall. Whenever he saw anyone vomit, he felt nauseated himself.

  Rafik stumbled toward the bathroom. Liyana followed, saying, “Are you sick?”

  He said, “No, dope-dope, that’s how we say hello in my language. What do you think?”

  Their mother buzzed the hotel desk to ask for a mop, but the clerk brought a broom instead. Then he ran for wet rags. Liyana sat with Rafik on the edge of the bathtub, considering aloud details of the last three meals they had eaten, to his horror. “Could it have been the cucumber on the plane? The little scrap of tomato in your sandwich?”

  “Could you please please please keep your mouth shut?”

  When he didn’t throw up again, but began smiling weakly and making jokes, their mother produced antinausea tablets from her medicine bag, told Rafik please to rest and take it easy, asked Liyana to stay with him, and went downstairs to join the family.

  Liyana lay on the other twin bed, idly reciting, “One potato, two potato, three potato, four…”

  Rafik said, “Did anyone ever tell you you’re mean?”

  FIRST THINGS LAST

  Her own first things kept lasting longest in her brain.

  Rafik fell asleep on top of his white bedspread immediately, so Liyana shut her eyes on her bed, too, and plummeted into a frozen scene. She dreamed she was standing at the top of the steepest hill in Forest Park, St. Louis, in front of the art museum, on a fresh morning of new snow. No one else was out yet.

  She held her wooden sled by its rope, trying to decide whether to jump onto it and swoop down the slope, but it was hard to do when your sled’s runners would be the first to mark the surface. Better to watch someone else doing it first—otherwise you weren’t sure how fast you would go.

  The horse statue was iced like a cookie. Bare trees poked their bony arms into the sky. At the bottom of the hill, the frozen lake glistened in the light. Liyana wore a nubby brown coat that hadn’t fit her in years. She’d kept it in the back of her closet till recently and felt sad, after the estate sale, that it was gone forever. She wore her turquoise mittens with a long cord connecting them, running up her sleeves and across her back to keep them together.

  How old was she in this dream, three? She was biting her lip hard, the way she used to do to make a decision.

  Although she’d thought she was alone in the snow, someone pushed her abruptly from behind and she plopped onto the sled, shrieking, flailing down the slope on her stomach. Who did that, Rafik? But Rafik would still have been a baby then. The sled was soaring. It became a rocket ship, a dizzy runaway. She couldn’t steer for a minute. The rope flew out behind her. What if she crashed into the lake? What if the ice broke? She screamed and closed her eyes. When she opened them, Rafik was leaning over her in real life, in Jerusalem, saying worriedly, “Are you okay? Or are you going bonkers, too?”

  “What do you mean, ‘too’?” Liyana’s tongue felt thick after her brief, busy nap. “Who else has gone bonkers? Do you know what I dreamed? Remember that hill in front of the museum?”

  Rafik’s main interest was, who had pushed her? Had the horse statue reared up completely off its base and given her a kick?

  He yawned. Then he said, “I’m surprised I still feel exactly like myself, you know what I mean? I thought when I got to the other side of the world, I might feel like somebody different.”

  TO THE VILLAGE

  Think of all the towns and cities we’ve never seen or imagined.

  Despite Rafik’s questionable health, the family talked Poppy into traveling out to the village that very first night. They were insistent with him at the tea party downstairs. Dinner is ready. You must come. The lamb is killed in your honor.

  Everything was decided, mysteriously, without anyone really saying yes or no. They crowded downstairs in a flurry to hail a whole herd of taxis and head north. Sitti rode in the car with the Abbouds, jammed up body to body with Poppy in the front seat beside the driver. Sitti muttered and patted him. It was the first time Liyana had ever pictured Poppy as the son, with his own mother bossing him around. Liyana, Rafik, and their mother crowded together in back.

  The taxi veered wildly around a corner, then chugged slowly north on the road from Jerusalem to Ramallah. Poppy pointed out landmarks to them. There’s the garden where we had a party when I graduated from high school. Red lanterns were strung from ropes. There’s the shop of the shoemaker Abdul Rahman—he’s been inside hammering soles since I was born.

  Liyana’s eyes swirled with stone buildings, TV antennas, metal grillwork over windows instead of screens, flapping white sheets strung from clotheslines right on the flat roofs of houses, signs in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, and lumbering buses. Rafik had gone to sleep again with his head back against the seat. Liyana felt like poking him to wake him up.

  “It’s not how I pictured it. What about you?” her mother said.

  Liyana answered softly, “Nothing is ever as I picture it.”

  Had she thought Jerusalem would have a halo? She certainly didn’t think about—diesel exhaust. They passed the military checkpoint surrounded by striped orange sawhorses. In the bustling Arab town of Ramallah, everyone walked around carrying large mesh shopping bags. A man with a tray of round flat breads stacked sky-high grinned at Liyana through the car window when their eyes met.

  Then the taxi headed into the rural West Bank of orchards and tiny villages, each with its own minaret and perched houses. Liyana said, “It’s gorgeous here!” and breathed deeply. She was also thinking, “It’s strange,” but she was looking for the silver lining. The dusky green of olive trees planted in terraced rows up hillsides, walls of carefully stacked stones, old wells with real wooden buckets…. Ancient men wearing white head-dresses leaned on canes talking in slow time as the train of taxis, driving faster now, flew by into another dimension.

  When the cars climbed the steep hill into the village, children popped out of front doors to look at them, as if cars didn’t drive up there very often. Rafik sat bolt upright and Liyana said, “We’re on the moon.” Every house was made of golden or white chunky sto
ne.

  The moment they piled out of their seats, they were surrounded by relatives kissing their cheeks again. Liyana’s face was starting to feel rubbed raw. A bearded man in a long cloak, whom Poppy introduced as Tayeb the Elder, shot a gun off into the air like a military salute. Poppy begged him to stop. What if the bullets came down on their heads?

  Inside Sitti’s arched main room, they sat on flowery gingham mattresses arranged in a circle on the floor. Liyana sat between Rafik and a shy girl cousin named Dina who kept smiling at her. An old picture of Poppy before he came to the United States hung high and crookedly on one wall. Liyana wanted to take a broom handle and straighten it.

  “We’re here!” Poppy kept announcing in English, then Arabic, like some kind of television host, and everyone would cheer. And a strange cloud passed through Liyana—they were here, but no one really knew her here, no one knew what she liked, or who her friends had been, or how funny she could be if she had any idea what was going on. She would have to start from scratch.

  Poppy and Mom—whom everyone had started calling Soo-Sun, in a way that made her common American name sound almost Chinese—began distributing presents to everybody. They passed out boxes of heart-shaped soaps, fuzzy slippers, creamy pink lotions, fancy hand towels, men’s shiny ties, and chocolates, which surprised Liyana, since they’d barely eaten chocolate in their own house. Mom had scurried around St. Louis buying these things before they left.

  Everyone looked very hopeful. After they received their gifts, they compared them. Liyana produced ten pairs of earrings she’d bought for a dollar each for her girl cousins. Dina, amazingly, had tears in her eyes as she selected her pair. Rafik offered up—reluctantly, Liyana thought—a few packages of small cars to the boys.

  Then the whole gigantic family sat around forever, visiting, waiting for dinner to appear. What Liyana would discover was this was positively everyone’s favorite thing to do here—sit in a circle and talk talk talk. Poppy had told her they liked to talk about—everyone else. They watched each other with their hundred deep eyes. When Cousin Fayed and his family poked their heads through the door, or Cousin Fowzi and Aunt Muna entered with welcomes and a basket of oranges, everyone stood up, hugged, kissed, exclaimed, patted, and went through the entire cycle again.

  “I think I’m getting hypnotized,” Rafik said.

  Then Aunt Saba, which Poppy said meant “morning,” appeared carrying a large brass tray filled with steaming glasses of musky-smelling tea—maramia—an herb good for the stomach. Rafik drank five glasses. Back home he could drink a whole bottle of cranberry juice by himself at one sitting.

  The grocer showed up, and the postmaster, and the principal of the village school, and the neighbor, Abu Mahmoud, who grew famous green beans, and all of their wives and babies and teenagers and cats.

  But the extra visitors left just as a huge tray of dinner appeared, hunks of baked lamb surrounded by rice and pine nuts. The remaining family members gathered around to dig into it with their forks. Poppy asked if his family could have individual plates since they weren’t used to eating communally.

  Aunt Amal brought out four plates of different sizes and colors. Liyana’s was blue, with a crack. Her aunt looked worried, as if she might not like it. Liyana ate a mound of rice and onions and sizzled pine nuts, but steered clear of the lamb.

  Sitti kept urging Liyana, through Poppy, “Eat the lamb.” She said Liyana needed it. Poppy told her Liyana was a very light eater, a big lie of course, but convenient for the moment. Rafik was drinking soupy yogurt, one of his two thousand favorite food items. “I’m recovering,” he whispered to Liyana. “I’m feeling better now. Who is that guy and why does he keep waving at me with his ball?”

  Rafik and their animated cousin Muhammad stepped into Sitti’s courtyard to play catch in the glow from a single bright bulb, but Liyana felt too tired, suddenly, to follow them. Sitti asked Poppy some questions about Liyana—Liyana could tell because they both stared at her as they talked. Now and then her name cropped up in their Arabic like a little window. But she couldn’t see through it. She thought she could close her eyes and sleep for two days. Even her watch felt heavy on her arm. It was 10 P.M. She hadn’t taken it off since they left Missouri—how many time zones had they crossed by now?

  Liyana tried to be polite to everyone by smiling and tipping her head over to one side so they couldn’t tell if she were saying no or yes. How long would it take till they knew one true thing about her?

  Voices in the village streets bounced off stone walls. They rose into the night sky like kites, billowed, and disappeared. A muezzin gave the last call to prayer of the day over a loudspeaker from the nearby mosque and all the relatives rose up in unison and turned their backs on Liyana’s family. They unrolled small blue prayer rugs from a shelf, then knelt, stood, and knelt again, touching foreheads to the ground, saying their prayers in low voices. They didn’t mind that Liyana’s family was sitting there staring at them. When they were done, they rolled up the rugs and returned to sit in the circle.

  “Poppy,” Liyana whispered, touching his hand. “Did you ever pray the way they pray?”

  “Always—in my heart.”

  Sitti told Poppy she was going to make a pilgrimage to Mecca this year for sure, especially if he would give her money to ride the bus. Tayeb the Elder asked for money to install a shower in his new bathroom and Uncle Hamza said he could really use a stove and suddenly everyone was asking for things, voices tangling together as Poppy translated. He looked more and more uncomfortable. Soon he turned toward their mother, saying, “When the talk gets to money, we get rolling,” and he stood up.

  He said they were so exhausted their heads were falling off. They needed to return to Jerusalem to their hotel immediately. Some angry grumbling erupted because the older relatives thought they should be sleeping in the village with their family, not in a hotel. Liyana felt the weight of centuries pressing her into a small ball. A yawn rose up in her so large she could not hold it back.

  Sitti stood beside Liyana. They were exactly the same height. Sitti took both Liyana’s hands in her own. She said, through Poppy, “I hope you will come back tomorrow and stay for many many days.” Sitti said they would teach her how to sew and pick lentils and marinate olives and carry water from the spring on her head and speak Arabic. Poppy said, “She’ll also teach you how to give a weather report by standing on the roof and licking one finger and holding it up in the wind.” Everyone laughed when he translated this. Was it a joke? Were they making fun of her?

  Sitti moved her hands around when she spoke, letting them weave and dance in the air. She lifted the tip of Liyana’s braid to look at it. She kissed her twice on each cheek. And she pressed Liyana’s face into her smoky scarf.

  Outside, the sky felt deep and dark as if a large soft blanket had been thrown over the hills and valleys; They stood for a long moment with their suddenly huge family staring off across shadowy fields and orchards, smelling the turned soil and the sweet night breeze. A donkey hee-hawed somewhere, the sound echoed, and a car motor cut off so the silence seemed deep as the sea. Poppy took a deep breath. “Home,” he said, and nodded at Liyana. He had his arm around her.

  MANGER

  She did not want her head to be filled with large wishes and worries.

  The Abbouds began looking for a house near Jerusalem and everything was either too big, too expensive, too little, too crumbling, too noisy, or too strange. One elegant house faced a billboard advertising “The Museum of Jewish Hatred.” Poppy told the realtor soberly that he was sorry, but he couldn’t bear to look out his window at that depressing sign.

  Waves of sadness swept over Liyana unexpectedly every time they entered a house that might become theirs and left it again. She thought of their neat white house with green shutters in St. Louis. She thought of their wooden screen door banging on its hinge. They kept passing the road sign TO BETHLEHEM and Liyana found herself singing, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Away in a Ma
nger” till Rafik covered his ears.

  Each night, she added to her sack of dirty laundry at the hotel, refolding any clothes she could stand to wear another day in a stack on top of her open suitcase. Poppy asked, “Didn’t you bring anything but that black T-shirt?” Only one of her suitcases had been sprung open so far. She wanted to be surprised later to find more familiar clothes and treasures waiting in her bags.

  Rafik, however, had opened every case he brought and was living in a heap of toys and treasures, a neon battery-powered yo-yo, a skunk puppet, and a harmonica. He even had the group picture of his last year’s school class standing up on his bedside table.

  Liyana wished Uncle Zaki, Poppy’s elder brother, had not asked “for her hand” for his son on their second trip to the village. Poppy got so furious, he actually hissed, and translated his answer for them later. “We do not embrace such archaic customs, and furthermore, does she look ready to be married? She is fourteen years old.” In the village everyone seemed to be staring at her now as if she were an exotic animal in a zoo. She felt awkward around her relatives, as if they had more in mind for her than she could ever have dreamed.

  She wished she had not heard that an Arab boy who was found kissing a girl in the alley behind her house got beaten up by the girl’s brothers. What was wrong with kissing? Everybody else kissed constantly over here—but on both cheeks, not on the mouth. Had people reverted to the Stone Age just because everything in Jerusalem was made of stone?

  Poppy sat Liyana down on the hotel room couch, which they were growing quite familiar with.

  “You are missing the point,” he said, “if you imagine you can measure one country’s customs by another’s. Public kissing—I mean, kissing on the mouth, like romantic kissing—is not okay here. It is simply not done. Anyway, it is not supposed to be done.”

  “Not by anyone?” she asked. “Not by Greeks or Jews or Armenians, or only not by Arabs?”