Habibi (10 page)

They slept on three skinny beds in a row, like in a dormitory. Sometimes Aunt Saba or Aunt Lena slept here, too. Sitti’s bed had a big dent in the metal headboard. Poppy had asked her about it and she said the Israeli soldiers did it one day when they were in a bad mood.

Sitti muttered to herself after the lights were out.

“What is she saying?” Rafik whispered.

“You think I know?”

“Do you think she’s praying?”

“No. It sounds more like a conversation.”

“With who?”

“Did you know she believes in angels and dreams?”

Long silence.

He was fading, his voice slower.

“I hope—she doesn’t dream—we’re monsters.”

What good is a mouth if it won’t open when you need it to?

Sometimes people carried anger around for years, in a secret box inside their bodies, and it grew tighter like a hardening knot. The problem with it getting tighter and smaller was that the people did, too, hiding it. Liyana had seen this happen, even in elementary school. Somebody wasn’t fair to someone, and the hurt person just held it in. By the end of the year they had nearly disappeared.

But other people responded differently. They let their anger grow so large it ate them up—even their voices and laughter. And still they couldn’t get rid of it. They forgot where it had come from. They tried to shake the anger loose, but no one liked them by now.

Liyana wondered if the person who could let it out, the same size it was to begin with, was luckiest.

In Jerusalem so much old anger floated around, echoed from fading graffiti, seeped out of cracks. Sometimes it bumped into new anger in the streets. The air felt stacked with weeping and
raging and praying to God by all the different names.

One afternoon, Liyana walked over to Bassam’s spice shop to buy coriander for her mother. She needed a purpose to start feeling at home. So she’d actually begged her mother for an errand. Bassam smiled to see Liyana again.

His shop was a flurry of good smells—jars, barrels, small mountains of spicy scent. Bassam weighed whatever you wanted on an antique scale that looked as if it came straight from the Bible. He put weights on one side of the scale and a large spoonful of coriander on the other. Then he poured it through a paper cone into a brown bag and folded the top over twice. He said, “So how are you doing over here? Are you finding your way?”

He gave her some fresh cardamom seeds still in their pods as a present.

She pointed at his elephant-god poster. “I read about Ganesha,” she said.

He brightened and said, “He’s my friend!”

They were talking about the Armenian sector and the best music stations on the radio when a Jewish man in a
yarmulke
walking by the shop addressed Liyana loudly in Hebrew.

Of course she didn’t understand him. She
didn’t even realize he was talking to her. But Bassam motioned to her to turn.

“What?” she said, and the man switched over to English.

“Why you bother with this animal?” he said, pointing to Bassam. “Be careful. Don’t trust animals. Go to better stores in our part of town,” so she knew he thought she was Jewish.

He probably didn’t care that Bassam spoke very good English.

Liyana’s legs started shaking. Her mouth opened wide and puffed out nothing. She felt feverish. She could have fainted on the ground.

The man said one more thing. “Be smart.” Then he turned and walked away. Satisfied.

Later Liyana wished she had chased him through the streets and hit him with her little spice bag. She could have swung it into his face till coriander clouded up his eyes.

Bassam didn’t say a word. He turned away and busied himself brushing spice crumbs off his table.

All the way home the words she hadn’t said kept crying out inside her. “I’m an animal, too! Oh, I’m so proud to be an animal, too!”

She couldn’t tell Poppy. She felt she had betrayed him.

What, she wondered, would Sitti have said?

Sitti might have howled like a coyote.

He wished for a whole basket of yellow pomelo fruits, sweeter than grapefruits, to eat by himself.

A German archaeologist was coming over for dinner. Rafik, starving as usual, flitted around their rooms saying, “I wish she’d hurry up. I wish I wish I wish.”

“Bro, you’re always wishing,” Liyana said. She was reading about the old kings and queens of England for her history class. Now there was an unhappy group.

Rafik wished he could do his homework sitting straight up in the salt of the Dead Sea. He wished he could dig a hole so deep, he’d find a lost city. Or a scroll.

He wished someone would lower him into a well. When Poppy was a boy, he’d been lowered into a village well on ropes because his aunts and uncles wanted to know what was down there.

Inside the musty hole, Poppy discovered secret shelves and shallow corridors dug into its sides above the water level. He shone his light on
ancient clay jars. Maybe they’d been lined up there from biblical times.

Poppy lifted out a deep blue vessel with a wide round mouth and a clay stopper. Small dried-up carob seeds rattled around inside.

Dozens of village people came by to see it that night. “How many jars are down there?” they asked him.

“Hundreds.”

They had a town meeting about it. What should they do?

Poppy kept shivering inside. What if he had seen bones? Skeletons and skulls?

And why did the ancestors hide their jars inside a well, anyway? Maybe the jars were filled with precious oils back then. Maybe the well was a secret hiding place in case of invasion.

The villagers decided not to tell anybody. If they told, no telling what would happen—already the countryside teemed with jeeps and foreigners and curious expeditions.

Poppy said he could never look at a well in the same way again. He went back to his own family house in Jerusalem and started wondering what might be buried inside the
walls
.

All this made Rafik want to
discover
something.

“It’s part of your heritage,” Poppy told him. “Dig, dig, dig.”

Finally the archaeologist appeared, smelling faintly of perspiration, and they dove into their cucumbermint soup. She wore a khaki shirt and a gold necklace charm shaped like a shovel. She told about the project she’d been digging on for ten years, in the desert near Jericho. “It takes
patience
” she said, looking at Liyana as if she didn’t have any. How did she know?

Rafik asked her if he could apply for a job.

She didn’t laugh. She said he could come out on a holiday sometime and she’d find tasks for him to do. He could carry buckets or sift through shards. He could be an apprentice. Then Liyana started getting interested, too.

“Just today,” the archaeologist said, “we uncovered a rich cache of pottery chips painted blue.”

Liyana and Rafik stared at Poppy meaningfully.

Later, when the adults had a boring discussion about what was wrong with the world these days, Rafik wished they’d be quiet. He preferred talking about bones. He’d told Liyana that whenever adults started talking about “the world,” the air grew heavy. Liyana was impressed with him sometimes. She agreed.

They wandered outside onto the balcony, just the two of them, and sat close together in the
evening breeze facing west. Even though the Mediterranean loomed far out of sight, beyond hills, neighborhoods and coastal towns, Liyana imagined she could feel sea breezes brushing her face. Sometimes it seemed they were coming from another world.

“Do you like it here?” she asked Rafik.

To her greatest surprise, he answered, “Yes.”

He hoped they would stay here forever.

He liked it so much more than he had expected to.

He didn’t even miss playing baseball in the back lot anymore. Soccer was better. And he
certainly
didn’t miss his piano lessons.

For the first time, Liyana felt totally alone.

How long does a friend take?

One afternoon Rafik was working on definitions for his English vocabulary list and asked Liyana, “When does a person go from being an
acquaintance
to a friend? Where is the line?”

Liyana said, “Hmmmm. The line. Well, do you have any what-you-would-call-friends here yet?”

He thought about it. “Sure. Well, maybe. This guy Ismael in my class is my friend already. I might have more than that. Don’t you?”

Liyana said, “Hmmmmmm.” He hated when she was in this mood.

Rafik persisted. “Could becoming a friend take just a few minutes? So someone would be your acquaintance very briefly? Or could you skip that step and go straight to friend? And can it go the other way, too? Like, can you be friends first, then become only acquaintances later? If you don’t see each other anymore?”

Liyana wanted to think her friends back home would always be her friends. She said, “I think friendships are—irrevocable. Once you’re friends you can’t turn back.”

“What’s
irrevocable?
Another vocabulary word?”

Something bad was happening today. A chain of Israeli military tanks lumbered up the road. Liyana stared out the window glumly. “It looks ugly out there.”

The silver-lining theory made her think they should do something to change the mood in the air. It wasn’t hard to convince Rafik to drop his pencil. Having seen Imm Janan, their landlord’s wife, take the bus toward Ramallah thirty minutes before, they went downstairs to their stony, grassless backyard and unhinged the door to the chicken coop for the first time. The chickens stepped out, at first tentatively, then wildly, as if they’d been loosed from prison. They flapped their wings up and down. The happy hens scrabbled in the dirt for bugs and worms. Were there worms here, like back home? Did the whole world have worms?

Liyana stooped to see a chicken gobble a plump green caterpillar. It wasn’t long, thin, or brownish like an earthworm. Rafik interrupted her reverie by screaming, “It’s leaving! One of the hens has flown away!”

The hens were so fat, Liyana felt astonished
they could fly. But one had indeed just taken off, over the whitewashed wall. Rafik and Liyana left the others, unlatched the gate, and went running after the vagrant.

Down the road, past the looming cedar trees that looked as if they might once have circled a cemetery, the chicken did a mixed fly-flap-and-skid routine. She bounced onto the earth, taking off again so quickly, they couldn’t catch up with her. Rafik waved his arms as he ran. Liyana tried to keep up. “What will we do? She’s too fast!”

They lost sight of her at the gate to the refugee camp. Liyana thought she had gone inside. “Oh no!” she wailed. “What if someone catches her and eats her?”

But Rafik thought she had passed the camp and was heading down through low bushes and scraggly trees toward the runways at the abandoned airport. “She thinks she’s a jet plane!” he yelled. “She’s taking off!”

Breathless, they ran around the perimeter of the airport, now strung with barbed-wire fences and signs that said N
O
E
NTRY
in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. “Do you see her in there?” Liyana called. But they saw only cracked pavement and dust.

Would the chicken come home automatically at nightfall, like a homing pigeon or one of those movie dogs that walked a thousand miles by secret radar?

“What if the
other
chickens have flown over the fence by now and Imm Janan has returned and the soldiers are circling our yard?” Liyana asked.

Rafik said what Poppy always said. “You’re a dramatist.”

But then something great happened. Walking back toward home past the refugee camp, Liyana stared over the clutter of wires, posts, and sawhorses that made up its jagged boundary, and there, among clotheslines and ramshackle dwellings, she spotted one tall redheaded boy with their chicken cradled in his arms. He was petting it, his head down close to its face.

“Hey!” Liyana called. “Hello!
Marhaba!
”

The boy looked up and grinned. He called out something in Arabic that Liyana and Rafik couldn’t understand. Then he walked out the front gate of the camp and said, shyly, “Hello? He is—your bird?”