Habibi (13 page)

Prepare for an unexpected visitor heading toward your door.

Back in the United States, Liyana’s classes had oral history assignments where they were supposed to go home and ask their oldest relatives or neighbors what the world was like long ago.
What did you eat? What did you do for recreation? How did your mother cure a headache?
They could write the answers down or tape them, then choose the most interesting parts and compose a paper.

Of course Liyana always picked Peachy Helen, but Peachy would protest. “Honey, you think I remember that far back? I barely remember what happened yesterday! Let’s just forget about it and share some scones with lemon curd, what do you say?”

Liyana would open Peachy’s dresser drawers, pulling out a silver bracelet engraved with tipis and canoes, and dusty powder puffs, trying to jar her memory.

Usually she’d end up having to talk to Frank,
their neighbor in blue overalls who specialized in car engines and organic farming methods. He didn’t remember much about childhood, or he wouldn’t tell. But Sitti
remembered everything
. She even remembered when a Turkish tribe rode south past Jerusalem and the children were told to lie down in ditches so they wouldn’t be run over by horses.

The problem was Liyana could only have a deep conversation with Sitti if Poppy were present. In Arabic class at school, Liyana was just learning the colors—
fidda
for silver,
urjawaani
for purple.

Anyway, Sitti loved when Poppy was present. She rubbed the back of his hand till he looked uncomfortable. He had been her last of eight children, born when she was past the usual childbearing age.

One Saturday in the village, with a light rain falling softly outside, Liyana tested her cassette tape and plopped down on a floor mattress beside Sitti, who was cracking almonds again by her fire in the oil stove. Liyana slipped off her blue Birkenstocks. Sitti picked one up, turned it over, looked at its sole upside down and said in Arabic, “It’s too fat.”

Tell me a story.

“About what?” Sitti laughed. She offered
Liyana an apricot.
The whole world was a story. Stories were the only things that tied us to the ground!

Because she knew Sitti liked the subject, Liyana asked for “a story about angels.” Poppy looked dubious even as he translated. He thought angel talk was foolishness.

Sitti stared at Liyana’s cassette recorder as if it were an animal that might bite her with its tiny teeth. A thread of faraway music floated past and vanished.

Sitti placed both hands over her own eyes, as if casting a spell on herself, and began speaking. “Your grandfather, my husband, who died so long ago already, used to come home with his pockets full of a plump kind of dates, not those thin, dried-up ones that make you thirsty even in your sleep. He would present them to me as if they were coins or golden bracelets. He knew I loved them very much. We would place them in a white bowl covered with a cloth in the cabinet and we would eat them one at a time and I am not ashamed to say we did not tell the children they were there. Because one hundred little children from everywhere were always passing through this house. And there would not have been enough of them to go around, you know? But also, we wanted them ourselves!” Sitti laughed her throaty laugh.

“So one day I was taking a nap as your grandfather
traveled up to Galilee and an angel appeared in my dream and said she would give me some important advice, because she was an angel. ‘How can I be sure of that?’ I asked her. I can’t believe I was so rude to an angel!

“She said,
I will soon appear to your husband, who is carrying luscious dates in his pockets and I will ask him to share them with me and he will not be able to say no. Check with him when he comes back. That will prove it. Now here’s the advice
—and she gave it to me. So the minute he returned I said, ‘Did you get dates?’ and he looked sorrowful.

“’Yes,’ he said, ‘but as I was standing in the
souk
—the marketplace—a young girl with strange eyes came up to me and said,
Please sir, I beg you for the food you are carrying in your cloak,
and as she seemed to have some extra power to see through cloth, since the dates were not visible, I felt obliged to hand them over. Then I couldn’t find any more to buy before I came home.’”

Liyana asked, “What was her advice?”

“What? Oh. Not to buy the cow. Someone was selling a cow just then. We never have many cows around here, you know. There’s only one right now, down the road in Hossaini’s courtyard. Most people like goat’s milk better. But I always liked cow’s milk better so I wanted your grandfather to buy a cow that was for sale in the next village. He
didn’t want to. He didn’t like cow’s milk. Also, cows need more to eat than goats. And he didn’t want it tied up in our courtyard at night taking up all the room.

So we didn’t buy it. Good thing! Because we heard it died only a few weeks later. So the angel saved us from trouble! And all we lost was—a few dates.”

Sitti cleared her throat and smiled. She stared at Liyana meaningfully. Poppy was finishing his translation. He still looked dubious.

Leaning over to Liyana, Sitti stroked her hair, the way you’d pet a cat or dog. “Always listen to the angels who find you,” she said. She placed two fingers in the center of Liyana’s forehead and closed her eyes.

So Liyana closed hers, too.

Maybe this was a charm.

When Liyana’s aunt had to go to the hospital because her legs swelled up, Sitti said they swelled “because she has such a big and heavy head.”

When Poppy told her that had nothing to do with it, she said, “What do you know? Your head is normal sized.”

If a bird pooped on a clean white sheet while flying over the clothesline, that meant bad luck.
But if it pooped on your head, that meant your first child would be a boy.

Sitti wouldn’t wear socks because cold feet would help her live longer. She thought Liyana should stop wearing socks, but Liyana couldn’t stand it.

Sitti perceived messages everywhere.
You will soon go on a long journey to a place hotter than this place. Beware of a bucket.

Liyana liked this stuff. She made a whole new notebook for it.

Poppy said he became a doctor because he grew up with such superstitious people. “They drove me crazy,” he told Liyana in private. “I had to balance them out.”

“Do you believe in heaven?” Liyana asked Sitti on the day of their interview, and she answered quickly, “Of course. It’s full of fresh fruit.” They took a short break to slice three Jericho oranges in half and share them. Sitti closed her eyes when she swallowed. Then she bustled around the room, muttering, sweeping the windowsill with her short-handled broom, straightening the bags of rice and flour and sugar on her shelves. She pulled a few strands of long hair out of her pink comb.

“What’s she saying now?” Liyana asked.

Poppy said, “I think she’s reciting the bees passage from the Koran.”

Liyana sang out, “Ho!” to get her attention again.

Sitti jumped. “Sit down!” Liyana begged her. “Please!
Min-fad-lick co’dy hone!
” It was one of the first phrases she’d learned.

Liyana asked Sitti to tell more about her dreams at night and she said, with a mournful expression, “I dream of all the hard times I had in this life. And how mean the Jewish soldiers act to us. They don’t even know who we are! And I dream of the way I felt when my most beautiful and beloved son,” she paused dramatically, staring at Poppy, “went so far away from me I couldn’t even see the tip of his shadow.”

Liyana’s father liked this conversation less and less.

Sitti ordered Poppy to give money to the poor before she died and more money to the grave digger and the women who washed her body. She insisted the people who buried her should leave lots of space in her grave so she could sit up to talk to the angels. She didn’t like to talk to anyone lying down.

Liyana laughed out loud, but Poppy stood up, rubbed his hands together over the fire, and said, “Let’s do something else.”

We have some new friends who live at the refugee camp down the little road behind our house. They have a bicycle and we do not and sometimes they let us ride theirs. The tire is rubbing the fender. Poppy says we can get a bicycle soon. Liyana says she hopes we can get two. They caught our chicken when it flew away. It is not really ours but we act like it is. Khaled thinks we live in a very big house because their house has only two rooms. When we visit them, Nadine, his sister, makes us drink this red juice made from pomegranates which makes my mouth go into shock.

Sometimes they come over and watch Abu Janan’s television with us. They don’t have a television and we don’t either. Abu Janan says it makes him happy when people fill up his rooms. Liyana likes ancient reruns of
“I Love Lucy.”
She says Desi Arnaz and his cute accent remind her of Poppy. I like
“Tarzan,”
who reminds me of Liyana. I wish Abujanan had a Super Channel so we could pick up
“Star Trek,”
my favorite American show. Liyana has no interest in
“Star Trek”
at all. She hates the jumpsuits the characters wear and
says their faces have seams. Also she says she has never seen anything green on that show, like a blade of grass or a tree. So she is glad there is no Super Channel and when I told her I would save up my change from my lunches so I could pay for the channel, she said she would steal my money and donate it to the refugee camp.

Khaled and Nadine like anything at all. They have lived in the refugee camp all their lives. They like whatever we watch. They roll their Rs when they speak English and we told them they do not have to do that. I’m sure they could tell us a lot of things, too.

Rafik Abboud

Emily Dickinson never had to move across the sea.

After a nurse appeared at St. Tarkmanchatz without warning and plunged a clumsy cholera injection into the arm of each student, Liyana stayed home from school for days with a raging fever. “I think she
gave
me cholera,” Liyana mumbled, after falling asleep with a thermometer in her mouth. Her mother bathed her face with cool water and set up a water pitcher beside her. Her father gave her some medicine he worried wouldn’t help much. They both said, “Rest, rest, rest.”

From her bed, she could hear her family continuing their lives without her. Clinking. Opening doors. Rafik running water in the bathroom.

She was—
incidental
—to the planet’s actions.

For one day she lay dreaming of the part in Jackson’s hair. When she had told him she was leaving the country, a week after their kiss at the
movies, he looked as blank as an ironing board.

Someone dropped a book down the hall. Someone banged a locker door. Why did she remember those sounds?

He put on a cowboy voice and said,
“Well—see ya later—pardner.”

That is what he did.

The second day she lifted her hand to flip open a book of poems by Emily Dickinson, trying an experiment. Each time Liyana read a Dickinson line she really liked, she’d close her eyes and make up a line of her own inside her head. I’m not copying, she thought. I’m being
infused
. It’s like drinking water straight from Sitti’s spring.