Habibi (26 page)

Omer, Khaled, and Nadine ate so much that everyone was complimented. The aunts always teased Liyana’s family about living on “crumbs of bread and mint leaves.” No one seemed suspicious of Omer, as Poppy had said they might. In fact, they seemed flattered that any mystery person would want to spend time with them. When you sat around with people, regular people with teacups and nutcrackers, they just wanted to get to know you.

Sitti threw her head back to gulp a soda straight from the bottle. A scraggly cat leapt through the doorway onto the ledge above Sitti’s bed. She waved it away, muttering and mumbling.

“What’s she saying?”

“I won’t even begin to tell you.” Poppy sighed.

Khaled said, “She told him he is not invited and he can go cook his own dinner with the other cats on the roof.”

They ate and ate and ate. The whole day tasted wonderful. Afterward, when matches were struck for the awful after-dinner cigarettes and steam rose in small clouds from coffee cups, Omer said something directly to Sitti in slow, broken Arabic, which made the whole room go quiet. Now they
knew
he wasn’t from St. Louis. A little hush rolled around the room.

Sitti replied in a voice more booming and animated than usual. It made Poppy sit straight up. Liyana tugged at him. “What is she saying?”

Everyone in the room pinned their eyes to her face. Except for Abu Daoud, who stormed from the room looking angry, after blurting something sharp to Omer. “What happened?” Liyana pulled Poppy’s sleeve.

Poppy spoke haltingly. He didn’t like translating if the person who had spoken could understand him. But sometimes he had to. Omer had said how much it meant to be with them. He thanked them for their welcome and said they felt like family to him. He wished they didn’t have all these troubles in their shared country. Sitti said, “We have been waiting for you a very long time.” But Abu Daoud, who now realized Omer’s identity, hissed, “Remember us when you join your army.”

Later Liyana would try to remember exactly what the room looked like during the next few moments. Maybe the light changed. Maybe the sunbeams falling across Sitti’s bed intensified, and the small golden coffee pot glittered on its tray. The day turned a corner right then, but you would
have to have been paying close attention to see it.

Sitti plunged into a new story, her voice dipping and swooping energetically, hands fluttering around her face. Omer stared at her with complete attention. Poppy frowned as she spoke.

“She’s saying,” Poppy translated hesitantly, as if the story tasted slightly bad in his mouth, “that your friend here reminds her very much—of someone she used to know. Someone—she liked a lot. Nobody knew it, though. He played a little flute—called a
nai
—that used to be more popular over here. This was—forty, fifty years ago? He was a shepherd and—he slept in a cave. Shepherds do that. Or, they used to.”

“Cool!” Rafik said.

“And she was—married for a long time already. So she kept her feeling for him—hidden. For years. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this! Maybe she shouldn’t be telling me! Hmmmmm. She says—he ‘saved her heart.’”

Poppy put his hand to his forehead and pinched it, massaging the skin the way he sometimes did when he was trying to work out a problem. But Sitti kept talking. Khaled and Nadine looked mesmerized. Liyana’s cousins’ mouths hung wide open. Aunt Saba let a cigarette burn down to a stump between her fingers and flicked it into the air when it stung her.

Poppy cleared his throat loudly and continued translating. “The shepherd—had a healing power, she says. For
air!
He could make the air feel calm again when it felt troubled. You know—after something bad happens—it’s like a bad note hangs in the air? Hmmm—She says he could fix it. He would walk up a road—playing his flute. His flute—fixed it. I wish he were still here!”

Liyana’s mother said, “Where is he now?”

Poppy held up one hand. “Wait a minute, she’s going
on and on
. She says—your friend—has her friend’s—same kind of hair. He has—his exact same shape of head. He has—something in the way he turns his eyes to things.”

Now Sitti opened both her hands to Omer and said,
“Khallas.”
Finished. The story was done—for the moment. She also said
“Shookran,”
thanking him, and smiling widely.

Omer leaned forward to take both her hands in his and thanked her back, in Arabic. The room stayed entirely quiet. Sitti laughed her gutsy, throaty laugh.

Poppy said, “She thinks your friend is—the angel—of her friend, who was killed in the ’67 war. He wasn’t fighting either. He was standing in front of a fruit shop in Nablus.”

“You mean—she thinks Omer is his reincarnation?”

Poppy didn’t know the word in Arabic, but he tried. She shook her head. “No, she says, the angel. I can’t explain. She thinks one person can carry the spirit of another person in—an angel kind of way. Omer, you’ve got a load on your back you didn’t even know about!”

Omer spoke softly. “I’m happy to carry him.”

Omer and Liyana slipped away for another walk before sunset without Rank or anyone else. Liyana felt sneaky, but relieved to have a few moments alone. If Sitti could be a renegade, then she could, too. They climbed the highest hill above the village to the abandoned stone house where her uncle used to live. He had been a recluse and almost never came down.

The path rose at a steep angle. Omer offered Liyana his hand more than once. When they were out of sight of the village, he no longer let hers go.

Weeds had grown up tall around the house’s pale sunbaked stones. A cool breeze drifted through her uncle’s open windows. He had died five years ago.

“What did he eat?” Omer asked.

“What he grew in his fields. They say he was very thin.”

Inside the vacant house, they took deep breaths.

Liyana said, “My grandmother is full of surprises.”

Omer said, ‘Oh Liyana. I’m glad your grandmother isn’t mad that I came.”

“Hardly!”

Liyana’s throat flickered. She gulped and stared at him hard.

Omer said, “Do you think I kissed other people before? Well, I didn’t. It’s a big surprise to me. I don’t want you to get in any trouble,” he said. He kissed her hand.

She laughed. “Maybe a
little
trouble. I can’t see any way around it.” She leaned forward and kissed him one time on the mouth, then they both looked out the window into the valley, side by side.

Liyana did not think her uncle’s spirit was angry with them for being on his hill. Distant plowed fields seemed to steam and breathe. She felt a great peacefulness floating in the air.

Poppy was standing outside looking up into the night sky when they appeared in the dark. He shook his finger at Liyana. But she knew sometimes he just pretended to be mad because he
thought he ought to be. “Where have you been?”

“On the hermit tour.”

Rafik and Nadine were collecting the popped bodies of balloons from the ground and handing them to Sitti, who stretched out the elastic skins and let them spring back to flatness. She groaned and looked entranced. Then she poked them into her belt.

Omer took both Sitti’s hands in his again when they said good-bye. She peered deeply into his eyes and said, “Be careful! Come back! Please come back!”

Omer said, “Thank you, thank you, I am so happy to know you.”

Liyana didn’t even need translations.

On the drive home, Liyana felt exhausted in a good, full way. Rafik had hurt his knee on a rock and kept moaning in the back seat. Khaled said, “Now you’re like me.” The two of them were eating a handful of pumpkin seeds, pitching the shells out the open window into the blackness. Some of them flew back in and hit Liyana on the forehead. Normally she would complain. But this night she didn’t care. She just brushed them away and leaned in Omer’s direction.

Poppy said, “Today was quite an experience. Nineteen people asked me if they could borrow money.”

Liyana’s mother said she’d had the best day ever in the village and had finally learned how to make
lebne
by straining yogurt through cheesecloth. She thanked Khaled, Nadine, and Omer for their kindness to the children. “I don’t think they will forget those balloons for a very long time.” Poppy said he would drop Khaled and Nadine at the camp and drive Omer home since it was too late to catch a bus. Liyana could come along for the ride if she wanted to.

The roads were deserted at this hour. A skinny moon lay tipped on its back.

The calendar has a wide-open face.

Liyana lit one short candle in a blue glass cup and set it on the rug in front of her in her bedroom. Then she sat cross-legged before it. Everyone in her family had gone to sleep.

Flipping open an old notebook she’d written in just before she left St. Louis, she read,
It is hard to find anyone else who will admit they do not want to grow up. My friends say they’re ready. Claire says it sounds great to her. Mom says she felt relieved to get older, even though she loved Peachy. Finally she was under “her own jurisdiction.” That makes it sound like a court case. Poppy liked growing up because it meant he could travel “beyond the horizon.” That makes it sound like “Over the Rainbow.” Why does everything sound like something else?

I want a map that says, “Here is the country of littleness, where words first fell into your mouths. Here are roads leading every direction. Some people will travel many roads. Some will set up camp close to their first homes. Some will stop loving their early words. Nothing will be enough for them. Keep your hearts simple and smooth

The entry ended there, in midair, without punctuation, after a sketch of a circle with squiggly lines extending out from it. Sometimes Liyana felt tempted to draw a large X over the pages in her notebooks.

Tonight she sat a long time before writing on the first page of one of the new blue notebooks Poppy had given her for her birthday.
There is no map
. She closed her eyes and waited. Then she wrote,
Every day is a new map. But it’s just a scrap of it, an inch
.

Then she leaned back against her bed.
I like inches,
she wrote.
They’re small enough to hold
.

The candle flame was swallowing itself. She tipped the glass to the side so the hot wax wouldn’t smother the wick. In the other rooms of the house her parents and Rafik were wrapped in their deepest, dreamiest breaths by now. She stood, stretched, and stared out the window into the utterly clear night. A few tiny lights blinked from poles to the west and the south. People she would never know were sleeping in their beds and turning over.

An odd thought came to Liyana. Maybe this close feeling was a gift for growing older. Maybe this was what you got in place of all the things you lost.

How did a friend change your heart? Could
things still be simple? She didn’t need
everyone
to know her—just a few people. That was enough. She needed her family, two countries, her senses, her notebooks and pencils, and her new devotion to—trade. When you liked somebody, you wanted to trade the best things you knew about. You liked them not only for themselves, but for the parts of you that they brought out.