Habibi (14 page)

When she read,
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind
—
As if my Brain had split
—her own head answered,
A Canyon opened—where before there had been smooth land. Now where do I stand?

The third day Liyana was sick, she watched the sun crawl through her room as the hours progressed. It does this every day when I’m not here to watch it, she thought. Light rays crept across the windowsill, touching the legs of the table, and her schoolbooks toppled like monuments beside
the tangled sheets of her bed—she’d kicked the blankets to the floor because she was SO HOT.

Long fingers of sun inched across her mattress. When she thought, this is the same sun that strokes the faces of my old friends back in my earlier world, her eyes felt thick. What was Claire doing at this moment? Claire’s recent letter told about the school spelling bee that Liyana had won the year before, a new singer that everybody liked, crushes and anticrushes. It also said, “Are you
all right?
” because the bad news of Jerusalem made it across the ocean more quickly than good news ever could. If Liyana answered at this moment, she would have to say, “No.”

Sitti appeared that afternoon with a flushed face, looking upset. She kept repeating something so Liyana’s mother called Poppy at the hospital to translate. Poppy had spoken with Sitti that morning by telephone and mentioned Liyana was home sick. Sitti was furious he hadn’t alerted her right away. Was he trying to insult her? Didn’t he know she could make Liyana well?

Sitti closed the door of Liyana’s room and smoothed the white sheets out on the bed, muttering the whole time. Sitti made Liyana lie very still with her arms stretched out alongside. Plucking a handful of silver straight pins from her plump cloth belt, she stuck them one by one, standing
up, into the sheets around Liyana’s body. Liyana kept cracking her eyes open to peek at what Sitti did. She mumbled the whole time she worked. More and more pins appeared. There must have been hundreds! Soon the pins outlined Liyana’s body like a metallic running fence.

Then Sitti said a series of prayers. She leaned over Liyana with a rocking motion, back and forth, rubbing her own hands together over Liyana’s body and opening them wide. She flicked her fingers, as if she were casting the illness aside. Liyana felt spellbound. A cool current seemed to shoot through the pins around her. Were they breaking the circuit of the fever or what? She couldn’t even tell how long all this went on. Twenty minutes? An hour?

Rafik returned from school and stepped into Liyana’s room to say hello to Sitti. “Wow!” he said. “It’s a voodoo bed!” Khaled and Nadine were downstairs sending
Get Well
greetings.

Then Liyana began sweating profusely. Sitti acted happy now. She took towels, wiping Liyana’s face and arms and legs very hard. Liyana called to her mother, “I’m
starving!
” It was the first appetite she’d had in days. Her mother brought her slices of fruit and toast and soup.

All through dinner, Rafik reported to his sister later, Sitti chastised Poppy for not having let her
heal Liyana earlier. She shook her finger and frowned, telling him he should have been smarter, especially since he was a doctor and all. She slept on the couch, and left early the next day, on the first bus back to the village.

The fourth day Liyana felt well enough to eat three bowls of tapioca pudding. She could have written to Jackson to say, “Guess what? I forgot your last name.”

Instead she stood by the front window staring down on streams of cars passing by. A yellow license plate meant Jews and blue meant Arabs. When you stayed home for days in a row, it seemed strange to remember all the places you would have been going otherwise.

Liyana could see the old man, Abu Hamra, pushing his cart of lettuces and cabbages up to the crossroads where he sat with it. Abu Hamra didn’t like you to peel back the outer layer of a cabbage to peek inside. The first time Liyana visited his stand with her mother, she idly tried to see inside a tight cabbage’s head, but Abu Hamra snapped at her so loudly, she dropped it.

Poppy said Abu Hamra’s family had their well closed in by Israeli soldiers a few years ago after his nephew was suspected of throwing stones at an Israeli tank. That could make you mad for a long time, Poppy said. Losing your water because of a rumor.

Beyond the lettuce cart, a donkey sprawled by the road on his side, head down, as if he were sick, too. Where had he come from? Had a car hit him in the night? No one stopped, or paid him any attention.

Liyana slowly pulled on her oldest, palest blue jeans. She hadn’t been dressed in four days. She never knew blue jeans were so heavy. Her mother stood in the kitchen chopping vegetables for soup. The house smelled healthy, of celery and carrot broth. Her mother looked surprised to see Liyana up and about.

“Are you well?”

“Not quite, but I’m going down to see the donkey by the road. I think he’s hurt or sick.”

Her mother shook her head. “The fever must have affected your brain. No ma’am. Get back in bed, dearie.”

For some reason Liyana started crying.

“He needs me,” she moaned. Then, more logically, “What if he needs me?” She begged her mother to let her carry him a pan of water.

Mom examined her with a tipped eye. Then she dried her hands thoroughly on her apron. “I’ll go with you,” she said. “Put a sweater on, too. It’s windy out.”

They filled the bottom of the steamer pan with water and took along a saucer and spoon.

The donkey’s velvety eyes were closed. He
breathed heavily and seemed to like their gentle stroking. His muscles relaxed. A man in a car slowed down and called out to them in Arabic. Liyana shook her head.

“I think he said the donkey’s dead, but he’s wrong,” she told her mother.

“Is your Arabic really that good already?”

“No, but I have a better imagination in Arabic now.”

The donkey opened one glossy eye to look at them, but stayed down.

They spoke soothingly to him, spooning water onto his dry tongue. He licked it slowly around inside his mouth and swallowed. “Sweet donkey, take it easy, have a little sip.”

Liyana’s favorite Christmas song had always been “The Friendly Beasts.” In one verse a donkey speaks:
I, said the donkey, shaggy and brown, I carried His mother up hill and down, I carried her safely to Bethlehem town, I, said the donkey, shaggy and brown
.

Liyana asked her mother, “Do they have a humane society here?” Her mother didn’t know. While they discussed it, the donkey opened both eyes together for the first time, stared at them, heaved his deepest breath yet, and died. He was suddenly, absolutely gone. They didn’t see any soul rise out of his mouth or nose, though they were looking hard.

For the second time in an hour, Liyana cried. Even her mother was wiping her eyes. Where had he come from? She would ask Khaled and Nadine if someone was missing a donkey from the refugee camp. Liyana wanted to bring a sheet out from the house to cover him, but they only owned the sheets for their beds and one set extra. Her mother put a soft hand on Liyana’s shoulder.

“Let’s go on home,” she said. “We did what we could. And we were with him when he left us.”

In the night his body disappeared. Maybe someone with a truck carried him away. Liyana felt bad that nobody stayed with him till that happened.

The fifth and last day that Liyana was at home recovering, she thought about donkeyness all day. She tried to sketch a donkey in her notebook. Her drawing was hopeless. Some people say a donkey is a “humble” beast—unlike a proud Arabian horse, for example. She thought about the word “humble” because Poppy had told her it was something she needed to work on.

She did not feel humble. She didn’t think she was
brilliant
or anything, but she
did
want people to like and miss her. She wanted more letters stacking up in Postal Box Number 898 that said,
“Nothing is the same without you” and “Please come home soon.” She pretended they were on their way. Poppy would flip them out of his briefcase and say, “Jackpot!”

Then she thought about the boy she’d seen in the lamp store. His dark hair combed smoothly straight back.

They could meet again. It was a small enough city.

We used to leave notes on smokers’ doorsteps saying, “Excuse me, but did you know your lung cells are shriveling up?” Signed, The F.B.I.

Liyana began visiting the Sandrounis’ ceramics shop every other day, memorizing the intricate curls of vines on fancy tiles.

She pretended she had various missions: to collect the store’s business cards to send to her friends back home, whose mothers had enormous interest in painted ceramics, or to purchase a small blue drinking cup, or to check again on the price of that green lamp which she would really love to see sitting by her bed. She wouldn’t even mind learning how to electrify things. She studied cords and switches.

The Sandrounis soon greeted her as if she were their old friend.

“Ho—back again? We are irresistible!”

Mr. Sandrouni folded a newspaper he was reading very carefully. “You know what?” he said to
Liyana, who just happened to be standing nearer to him than anyone else. “I think it is better to use newspapers for wrapping than for reading.” He placed the newspaper on his giant pile. “Always a bad story. Always something very sad.”

She wanted to ask about the cinnamon-smelling boy—was he their son, or nephew, and where was he now? But she couldn’t do it.

Finally, on the day she’d decided her browsing was getting ridiculous and she’d better stop hanging out in the shop or they’d put a detective on
her,
he appeared again, just where he had stood the first time, eating yogurt out of a cup.

“What’s up?” he said to her, tipping his head and smiling.

“I was taking a walk.” She coughed and grew courageous. “I was looking for you.”

He raised an interested eyebrow. “Yes?”

“I think we might—have more things to talk about.”

Liyana,
she said to herself,
Poppy would flip!

Here, in the land of dignity.

Here, where a girl was hardly supposed to THINK about a boy!

But he didn’t flinch. He grinned even more widely. “I’m
sure,
” he said. But he wasn’t making fun of her. “I think you are right.” His spoon rattled around in his cup. “Shall we talk about—yogurt?”

She took such a deep, relieved breath it sounded as if she were gulping. “I eat another kind without so much writing on the cup,” she said. “It tastes saltier and less creamy.”

“I prefer it myself,” he said. “This kind is more sweet. But the store was finished with—your kind. Do you like yogurt with fruit?”

“I hate it.”

“I hate it, too!”

Mr. Sandrouni looked vaguely amused. “Shall we start a taster’s club in here when business gets slow?” he said. “You could eat out of my bowls. Don’t they have those things—people tasting cheese and wine together?”

Liyana felt a charge of enthusiasm as if such a dopey conversation were electrifying her.

The boy put out his hand. “Don’t you think we should trade names now that we know so much about each other?”

She thought he said his name was “Omar” but he went by “Or.”

“Why?”

“It’s shorter.”

When she told him hers, he smiled. “A nice name,” he said. “I never heard it before.” He said it twice. Liyana thought it rolled around on his tongue.

She asked, “Is your last name Sandrouni?” and he looked startled.

“Me? No way! I’m not related to these guys! I’m just—an old friend of their family!”

Mr. Sandrouni said, “He asked me to adopt him, but I refused.”

Liyana and Or made a plan to meet for yogurt at Abu Musa’s the next day, after discovering they had exactly the same lunch break.