Habibi (4 page)

“Why couldn’t you have kept the piano?” Liyana said. “You could have stored it somewhere. Couldn’t Peachy Helen have fit it into her apartment?”

There were only a few things Liyana’s mother was attached to.

“Clean slate,” Mom said, as if they were talking in code, and Liyana said, “Huh?”

“We are starting over.” Her mother’s voice was so thin and wavery, it scared her.

She was usually so upbeat about things. Liyana and Rafik teased her about being the general of the Optimist’s Army.
Positive thoughts, ho! Forward march!
Liyana thought her words turned up at the ends, like elf shoes. “Look for the Silver Lining”
was her mother’s favorite song. She made Liyana and Rafik memorize it. Their mother wouldn’t even let them say things like “bad weather.” She wouldn’t look at a newspaper till afternoon because she didn’t want bad news setting the tone for the day. Peachy Helen, on the other hand, crouched over the newspaper on her kitchen table, moaning over kidnappings, hijackings, and hurricanes as if each one were personal. “I can’t stop thinking about Sarah’s mother,” Peachy said once.

“Who’s Sarah?”

“The girl who drowned in Colorado.”

This was some poor person Peachy and the Abbouds had never
met
.

Liyana’s mother placed her American hand over Liyana’s half-half one on the keyboard. “Go to bed. You’re going to need all the sleep you can get.”

On their last night in St. Louis, the neighborhood gave the Abboud family a going-away party in their front yard. The F
OR
S
ALE
sign on the house had a red S
OLD
slapped across it. Liyana licked custard from a cream puff and stared at their familiar, rumpled neighbors in their summer clothes. They’d be around all summer and Liyana’s family would not. She eavesdropped on everybody—eavesdropping
was her specialty. Talk about camp and favorite teachers and the opening of the neighborhood swimming pool made her feel wistful.

She tried to remember the exact sensation of Jackson’s kiss, but it was dissolving in her mind. She wished she had thought to invite him to this. But he might not have come, and that would have been worse. Claire dropped a small velvet ring box into Liyana’s hand at the last minute and ran home crying. A tightly folded note tucked under a silver friendship ring said, “I will never
ever
forget you.”

I vote for the cat sleeping in the sun.

When the weary passengers finally boarded the giant jet at Kennedy Airport and it lifted off the runway, her mother clutched Liyana’s wrist hard. “Oh my,” she whispered. She closed her eyes.

Liyana pressed her face to the window and looked down. Every little light of New York City was a period at the end of a sentence. A dusty silver sheen in the sky capped the city as it shrank behind them. The airplane dipped and shivered. Liyana had only flown short flights to Kansas City and Chicago before. She had never flown across an ocean.

After they reached their transatlantic altitude, Poppy took pillows and fuzzy blue blankets down from the overhead bins. Flight attendants moved up the aisles handing out bedtime cups of water. Rafik already had his head tipped off to one side, eyes shuttered, and mouth slightly open. Liyana couldn’t believe it. He could sleep anywhere, even with his life changing in the middle of a stormy sky. Liyana couldn’t imagine sleeping now. She
pressed the button over her seat so a sharp circle of light fell onto her lap. She wrote in her notebook,
“Do overnight pilots drink coffee? Do they take turns napping? A new chapter begins in the dark.”

Even her teachers back home had been nicer to her when they knew she was leaving. “Why don’t you tell us about where you’re going?” Mr. Hathaway, her history teacher, had said the last week of school. He had never liked Liyana since the day she let Claire, who sat behind her, French-braid her hair in class. “Of course we all
know
about Jerusalem—it’s such a big part of religious history and constantly in the news—but why do you think people have had so much trouble acting
civilized
over there?”

Civilized
was his favorite word. Once when Mr. Hathaway said people were and animals weren’t, Liyana raised her hand.

“Just—look at the front page of any newspaper,” she said nervously. It was harder to speak with a whole class staring at you. “Look at the words—for what people do:
attack, assault, molest, devastate, infiltrate.”

He raised one eyebrow.

Liyana continued, “And that’s just one page!”

When he invited her to write an essay about
Jerusalem for extra credit and read it to the class, she gulped. “It’s a pretty big story.” Crazy words came into her mind.
Yakkity boondocks. Flippery fidgets.

“Interview your father…make some informal notes,” Mr. Hathaway said. “Just use your own information—no encyclopedias for this! It may be your last chance for extra credit, you know.”

JERUSALEM: A BIT OF THE STORY

When my father was growing up inside the Old City of Jerusalem—that’s the ancient part of town inside the stone wall—he and the kids on his street liked to trade desserts after dinner.

My father would take his square of Arabic hareesa, a delicious cream-of-wheat cake with an almond balanced in the center, outside on a plate. His Jewish friend Avi from next door brought slices of date rolls. And a Greek girl named Anna would bring a plate of honey puffs or butter cookies. Everybody liked everyone else’s dessert better than their own. So they’d trade back and forth. Sometimes they traded two ways at once.

Everybody was mixed together. My father says nobody talked or thought much about being Arabs or Jews or anything, they just ate, slept, studied, got in trouble at school, wore shoes with holes in the bottoms, hiked to Bethlehem on the weekends, and “heard the
donkeys’ feet grow fewer in the stone streets as the world filled up with cars.” That’s a direct quote.

But then, my father says, “the pot on the stove boiled over.” That’s a direct quote, too. After the British weren’t in control anymore, the Jews wanted control and the Arabs wanted control. Everybody said Jerusalem and Palestine was theirs. Too many other countries, especially the United States, got involved with money, guns, and bossing around. Life became terrible for the regular people. A Jewish politician named Golda Meir said the Palestinian people never existed even though there were hundreds of thousands of them living all around her.

My father used to wish the politicians making big decisions would trade desserts. It might have helped. He would stand on his flat roof staring off to the horizon, thinking things must be better somewhere else. Even when he was younger, he asked himself, “Isn’t it dumb to want only to be next to people who are just like you?”

Rifles blasted. Stone houses were blown up. They were old houses, too, the kind you think should stand forever. My father’s best Arab friend of his whole childhood was killed next to him on a bench when they were both just sitting there. He won’t talk about it. My mother told me. My father remembers church bells ringing before that moment. Because of this, church bells have always made him nervous.

Everyone in my father’s family prayed for the
troubles to be solved. Probably the Jewish and Greek families were doing exactly the same thing. They held candlelight vigils in the streets. They carried large pictures of loved ones who had died. Everybody prayed that Jerusalem would have peace.

One night, when gunfire exploded near their house, Sitti, my grandmother, cried out to my father and his brothers, “Help! What should we do?”

My father said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m covering my head.”

And he did.

He says he just wasn’t interested infighting. He was applying for scholarships so he could get out of that mess. Sometimes he still feels guilty, like he ran away when there was trouble, but other times he’s glad he left when he did. He always hoped to go back someday.

During those bad troubles, my father’s family traveled north to a small village to stay with relatives. Sitti was too scared to stay home. Weeks later, they returned to Jerusalem to find their house “occupied”—filled with other people—Jewish soldiers with guns. Later the “Occupied Territories” indicated Palestinian lands that were seized by Israelis, so “occupied?” became a nasty word.

My father’s family went back to the village and moved into a big old house there, but they lost all the things inside their Jerusalem house. They lost their furniture and their dishes and their blankets and never got anything back. The Jewish soldiers with guns wouldn’t
let them. The bank wouldn’t give them their money either. So it was really hard.

I don’t understand how these things happen, personally. I’m just telling you what my father told me.

Other Palestinians ended up crowded together in refugee camps, which still exist today. They lived in little shacks, thinking they would be there only a short time. Unfortunately that wasn’t true.

My father got his scholarship to study medicine in the United States and his family was not happy. They didn’t want him to leave. He promised he would come back someday. It was hard for him to watch the evening news all these years. Sometimes the Middle East segments show people he knows. In medical school, he specialized in the care of old people because young people were too mixed up. Maybe he should have become a vet.

Then he met my mother, an American, which is why he stayed over here so long. Stories of the American Indians made my father very sad. He knew how they felt.

Only recently he grew hopeful about Jerusalem and his country again. Things started changing for the better. Palestinians had public voices again. Of course they never stopped having private voices. That’s something you can’t take away from people. My father says, wouldn’t you think the Jews, because of the tragedies they went through in Europe themselves, would have remembered this? Some did. But they weren’t always the powerful ones.

The Arabs ana Jews shook hands again, at the White House and in lots of other places, too. Many of them had never stopped doing it, secretly. Of course some people believed in the peace process more than others. Can you imagine why anyone would not? I can’t.

That’s when my father began planning for us to move back. He wants us to know our relatives. He wants to be in his old country as it turns into a better country. If it doesn’t work out, we can always return to the United States.

I think of it as an adventure. I will miss all of you, especially Mr. Hathaway’s pop quizzes and Clay ton’s fascinating monologues about mummies. If I become one, I hope you all will be fortunate enough to dig me up.

P.S. to Mr. Hathaway—that last part was just a Joke.

Liyana Abboud

Are dreams thinner at thirty-three thousand feet?

When their plane landed at Tel Aviv, Poppy was talking so fast, Liyana couldn’t pay close attention to details. Normally she liked to notice trees first—their leaves and shapes—when she arrived in a new place. Then she’d focus on plants, signs, and, gradually, people. Liyana believed in working up to people. But Poppy leaned across the aisle jabbering so fast, she could barely notice the color of the sky.

“When we go through the checkpoint for passports, let me do the talking, okay? We don’t let them stamp our passports here. They stamp a little piece of paper instead. And don’t leave anything on the plane. Look around! Did you check under the seats? We’ll go to the hotel first and rest awhile, then we’ll call the village. My family will come in to see us. They won’t expect us to travel all the way out to visit them today. Make sure you have everything. Did you get those pistachios? What about that book Rafik was reading?”

“Poppy’s nervous,” her mother whispered to
Liyana. “He hasn’t been here in five years.”