Habibi (21 page)

Reverend Walker said, “God told us to visit Mount Gilboa right now to see the blessed Gilboa iris that only blooms three weeks a year. So we packed our bags in Atlanta and
bought tickets! Amen!
”

Now they were waiting for further instructions from God because they hadn’t received a complete itinerary. What were they supposed to do after they had visited the flowers and the Church of the Nativity and the other holy spots lined up like pearly buttons across the stony ground?

Poppy offered his advice. “I know a hospital that could really use some volunteers right now. It’s in Gaza and all the orderlies have been quitting and the nurses are in an uproar and nothing is getting done. Just a day or two of help would be a—Godsend.”

The evangelists looked at one another. Reverend Holman said,
“Praise the Lord!”
after Mom served the lentil soup and the coleslaw, which reminded them of home, and the stuffed grape
Leaves and the hot bread. But every one of them was quiet when Poppy mentioned the hospital.

Reverend Crump told Poppy he wished they could say a prayer in Hebrew for him. Poppy mentioned that he didn’t know any prayers in Hebrew himself, but Liyana didn’t think they got it. When Poppy went to the kitchen to get a fresh pitcher of tea, she leaned forward and said gently, “We’re not Jewish, you know.”

Then Reverend Walker asked Liyana if she’d been bathed in the blood of Jesus and she could see Rafik’s eyes open wider. Luckily her tongue got stuck and her mother replied, “Um—we don’t think—quite in those terms.”

So everyone had some nut cookies and hot tea. Rafik said, out of the blue, “Do you know what our grandmother has in her collection? She has an empty tear gas canister that the Israeli soldiers threw at her house one day. It says
Made in Pennsylvania
on the side of it. The soldiers get their weapons and their money from the United States.” The guests’ eyes grew wide. They didn’t know what to say. Then Rafik buttered his last pocket of bread.

Reverend Holman said to their mother, as if Rafik and Liyana weren’t present, “Your children must feel alienated here, don’t they?”

Mom said, puffing proudly, “I think they’re doing quite well.”

Rafik added, sighing in a melodramatic way, “But we
do
miss the school milk in little red cartons,” which made his mother put her thumb and first finger together like an alligator closing its mouth.

After dinner the visitors went out on the front balcony to meditate on the hospital idea. Rafik and Liyana wrinkled their noses at each other and escaped into Rafik’s room, where he put on his cassette tape of Japanese bamboo flute music. Liyana stared out the window where the heavens blazed like an orange bonfire, and wrote in her notebook:

The hills are dark with the shadows of night
But up in the sky is a brilliant light
of fire, fire, fire in the sky.

That day her geography teacher had said Arabs and Jews should trade places for a while and see what it felt like to be each other. But Atom said it would be too hard to do. She wondered. Could she even imagine exactly what it would feel like to be her own brother? Poppy’s voice called them back to the living room. “We miss you in here!”

Reverend Crump asked for a last glass of water so he could take his “anti-panic pill” and Liyana stifled a laugh, pretending it was a cough. Poppy asked if the meal had upset him and he said, “Night brings on a brooding melancholia.”
when Reverend Walker laid her hand on his back and said something that sounded as if she were speaking in tongues, “HIYA-hallah-wallah-kallah-mone,” Rafik’s eyes widened with interest.

Reverend Holman announced they’d decided to travel on into Jordan because they really wanted to see the famous carved city of Petra, so they’d better not take on any voluntary duties at that poor hospital in Gaza after all. But Lord have mercy, they’d keep it in their prayers.

Later, after he had driven them back to their hotel, Poppy was muttering, “Holy, holy, holy.”

Darling: a dearly loved person, a favorite, a charmer.

For years the word floated in the air around their heads, yellow pollen, wispy secret dust of the ages passed on and on.

Habibi
, darling, or
Habibi,
feminine for my darling. Poppy said it before bedtime or if they fell off their bikes—as a soothing syrup, to make them feel sweetened again. He said it as good morning or tucked in between sentences. He said it when they left for school.

Whatever else happened, Liyana and Rafik were his darlings all day and they knew it. Even when he stayed at the hospital past their bedtimes, they could feel his
darling
drifting comfortably around them.

Their mother called them “precious”—her own English version of the word. She fed them, folded their clothes even when they could have done it themselves, and squeezed fresh orange juice instead of opening frozen cans.

At Liyana’s house they had fresh apple salad
with dates, baked yams, delicious stir-fried cabbage. They had a father who wrapped their mother in his arms. They had “
Habibi,
be careful,
Habibti,
I love you,” trailing them like a long silken scarf. Liyana knew it didn’t happen for everybody.

In Jerusalem they were living in the land of
Habibi
—Sitti rolled it off her tongue toward them and it balanced in the air like a bubble. They hovered inside the wide interest of these people they barely knew.

Their giant family offered them glasses of cool lemonade with sprigs of mint stuck in like straws. They handed them bowls of pastel Jordan almonds and the softest cushions to sit on.

In return, Liyana’s family gave them oddities to think about. Liyana played the violin for them and told them, through Poppy, she would be in a symphony in Europe someday. They didn’t know what a symphony was. Liyana wore blue jeans with paisley patches on the knees and her aunts pointed and whispered.

Poppy admonished her, “They think you’re destitute if you dress like that.”

Liyana said, “So?” She repeated the word inside her mind. “Des-ti-tute. Desti-TOOT.” She started to like it.

Liyana smashed a potato in a bowl, mixed it with butter, milk, and salt till it was creamy, and offered it to Sitti.
“Mashed potato,”
she said, as Sitti carefully tasted it, and smiled. Sitti took the whole bowl from her hands and gobbled it down. She even tried to shape the words.
“Mash bo-taytoes.”

It was the first English she’d ever tried to say.

Liyana’s whole family seemed to be joining things. Poppy had joined a human-rights group to focus on treatment and services for old people. Rafik had joined an ecology club at his school—they would work with garbage and recycling. Their mother belonged to a Women’s Communications Club—women of different backgrounds writing letters to editors and sharing optimistic ideas. She would probably be elected president soon. After their first meeting, the
Jerusalem Post
wrote an editorial saying if other people followed their example, the peace process might zoom ahead.

And Liyana? She belonged to nothing but Watchers Anonymous. She walked the streets of old Jerusalem muttering her new words in Arabic, sprinkling them down into cracks between stones.
Ana tayyib
—I’m fine.
Wa alaykum essalaam
—and upon you peace.
Shway
—a little bit. Watermelon
was
hubhub
. It wasn’t any harder to say
Ana asif
—I’m sorry—than it was to say other things.

But people acted like it was. Two taxi drivers honked and honked at a jammed intersection, refusing to budge. A boy threw a hard ball at a geranium pot on Imm Janan’s front step and it shattered.

Liyana was no better. One day in Arabic class she grew so irritated with the dull text, she ripped a whole page out of her book. The teacher ordered her to stand in the hall and wrote a mean letter to her father. In Arabic.

Poppy said,
“Habibti, please.”

Liyana took a walk by herself down by the refugee camp, standing for a long time in the pinkish light soaking up the quiet motions of evening. Women unpinned skirts and undershirts from lines. Where were Nadine and Khaled tonight? She always felt better when she talked to them. Boys polished crooked bicycles with rags. What pumped up their hopes?

“Poppy, do you think there will ever be a time when all people get along just fine?” she asked when she got home.

He was marking hospital charts at the table.

“Nope.”

What would Liyana do if she could?

She’d touch Omer’s shoulder lightly and leave a little
habibi
dust there. She’d place one secret red poppy alongside Sitti’s pillow and disappear into the cool night air.

Who can guess what the weather will bring?

Jerusalem woke to a blizzard for the first time in fifty years on Easter Sunday. Poppy stood by the front window exclaiming, “This is just not something you expect to see here!”

The road out front looked strangely deserted except for a few kids in raggedy jackets and two disoriented goats. Rafik ran downstairs in his pajamas, opening his mouth to the sky. He said the snow tasted like icing without vanilla in it.

Mrs. Abboud had tried to bake hot cross buns, as she did every Easter, but they didn’t rise. “Let’s call them hot cross pancakes,” she said. It was the first year nobody was interested in hiding any eggs.

The whole family drove slowly through swirling snow to the Garden Tomb, where Liyana’s mother wanted to attend the sunrise service. She got ideas into her head and would not let go of them, no matter what the weather. How could she miss her first Easter service here in the
place where everything had really
happened?
Arab families stood outside in their transformed yards staring happily up into the magical air. Did they even know how to make snowballs?

Recently, Liyana’s mother had narrated a program at the radio station called “Debate Over the Tombs.” Some people believed the tomb of Jesus was at a different location. Mom voted for the one on the cliff above the bus station, a cave in the craggy rock, where a small group of devout and frozen people was already waiting, shivering in skinny coats and scarves and hats and gloves.

The sun did not rise.

Or if it rose, no one could tell.

There was snow on the crooked branches of the olive tree. People crowded close among snow-capped stones while a priest with chattering teeth held his Bible and tried to speak. He said Easter gave human beings their highest hopes. It was the “greatest feast of the year, the victory march of the human soul.” Poppy leaned over to whisper in Liyana’s ear, “Jerusalem needs lower hopes, too; down-to-the-ground, pebble-sized, poppy-seedsized hopes.” She closed her eyes, trying to feel what it
meant
to be assured that dying did not just mean
dead
.

Many in the crowd were weeping. Maybe they had dreamed of being here for years. Maybe they
had traveled from Spain and California and the tears would freeze on their cheeks. Near the end of the service, a tall, thin-faced lady toppled over backward into the snow and struck Liyana with her elbow on the way down. Rafik blurted, “Whoa!”