Habibi (7 page)

Outside, the sky felt deep and dark as if a large soft blanket had been thrown over the hills and valleys; They stood for a long moment with their suddenly huge family staring off across shadowy fields and orchards, smelling the turned soil and the sweet night breeze. A donkey hee-hawed somewhere, the sound echoed, and a car motor cut off so the silence seemed deep as the sea. Poppy took a deep breath. “Home,” he said, and nodded at Liyana. He had his arm around her.

She did not want her head to be filled with large wishes and worries.

The Abbouds began looking for a house near Jerusalem and everything was either too big, too expensive, too little, too crumbling, too noisy, or too strange. One elegant house faced a billboard advertising “The Museum of Jewish Hatred.” Poppy told the realtor soberly that he was sorry, but he couldn’t bear to look out his window at that depressing sign.

Waves of sadness swept over Liyana unexpectedly every time they entered a house that
might
become theirs and left it again. She thought of their neat white house with green shutters in St. Louis. She thought of their wooden screen door banging on its hinge. They kept passing the road sign TO BETHLEHEM and Liyana found herself singing, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Away in a Manger” till Rafik covered his ears.

Each night, she added to her sack of dirty laundry at the hotel, refolding any clothes she could stand to wear another day in a stack on top
of her open suitcase. Poppy asked, “Didn’t you bring
anything
but that black T-shirt?” Only one of her suitcases had been sprung open so far. She wanted to be surprised later to find more familiar clothes and treasures waiting in her bags.

Rafik, however, had opened every case he brought and was living in a heap of toys and treasures, a neon battery-powered yo-yo, a skunk puppet, and a harmonica. He even had the group picture of his last year’s school class standing up on his bedside table.

Liyana wished Uncle Zaki, Poppy’s elder brother, had not asked “for her hand” for his son on their second trip to the village. Poppy got so furious, he actually hissed, and translated his answer for them later. “We do not embrace such archaic customs, and furthermore, does she look ready to be married? She is fourteen years old.” In the village everyone seemed to be staring at her now as if she were an exotic animal in a zoo. She felt awkward around her relatives, as if they had more in mind for her than she could ever have dreamed.

She wished she had not heard that an Arab boy who was found kissing a girl in the alley behind her house got beaten up by the girl’s brothers. What was wrong with kissing? Everybody else kissed
constantly
over here—but on both cheeks, not on the mouth. Had people reverted to the
Stone Age just because everything in Jerusalem was
made
of stone?

Poppy sat Liyana down on the hotel room couch, which they were growing quite familiar with.

“You are missing the point,” he said, “if you imagine you can measure one country’s customs by another’s. Public kissing—I mean, kissing on the mouth, like romantic kissing—is
not okay
here. It is simply not done. Anyway, it is not
supposed
to be done.”

“Not by anyone?” she asked. “Not by Greeks or Jews or Armenians, or only not by Arabs?”

With her luck she had been born into the only nonkissing culture, just when it started feeling like a valuable activity.

“I cannot speak for Greeks and Jews and Armenians. I used to trade desserts with them, but I cannot speak for them regarding kissing. Somehow I do not think they are as strict about kissing as the Arabs are. Probably to their benefit. Of course anyone can kiss once they are married.”

Poppy looked suddenly alarmed. “Is there someone you want to kiss?”

“Oh sure, I just arrived nine days ago and I’ve already staked him out.”

“Liyana, you must be patient. Cultural differences aren’t learned or understood immediately. Most importantly, you must abide by the
guidelines where you are living. This is common sense. It will protect you. You know that phrase you always hated—
When in Rome, do as the Romans do? You must remember, you are not in the United States”

As if he had to remind her.

When she went to bed that night, she pressed her face into the puffy cotton pillow. It smelled very different from the pillows in their St. Louis house, which smelled more like fresh air, like a good loose breeze. This pillow smelled like long lonely years full of bleach.

The next day Liyana’s family rented the whole upstairs apartment of a large white stone house out in the countryside, halfway between Jerusalem and the town of Ramallah. A bus stopped right in front. Surrounded by stony fields, the house had a good flat roof they’d be able to read their books on, if they spread out blankets. Poppy pointed out the old refugee camp down the smaller road behind the house—it had been one of the first ones from 1948. From the roof it looked like a colorful village of small buildings crowded close together. “Believe me,” Poppy said, “it looks better from a distance. Camps are difficult places.” Beyond it sat the abandoned Jerusalem airport—a
few streaks of gray runway and a small cower. “It’s fast asleep,” Poppy said sadly.

Each wide-open empty bedroom in the house had a whole wall of built-in wooden cupboards and closets and a private sunporch. Finally they’d be able to unpack.

Their new landlord, Abu Janan, which meant the Father of Janan, looked like the Prophet of Gloom, with a huge stomach too big for his pants. He told them they probably wouldn’t be able to get a telephone hookup for at least a year, since he just got his after requesting it forever.

Poppy said, “Well, I’ll work on it immediately since I’m a doctor and require one. Also” (he winked at Liyana), “don’t teenagers need to have telephones?” As if she had anyone to call.

“Where is Janan?” she asked.

“Who?” Poppy said.

“The person this man is the father of.”

“In Chicago. Grown up.”

Too bad. She’d thought she might have a built-in friend.

From the immaculate bare kitchen of their new flat, Rafik and Liyana could hear squawking rising from the backyard. They went downstairs and stepped outside to find a pen of plump black chickens pecking heartily in straw. A short cottage held their laying nests.

“We’re living at a manger after all,” Rafik whispered. “You want to sneak down sometimes and give them treats?”

“What is a treat to a chicken?”

“Cantaloupe seeds and the middles of squash.”

“How do
you
know?”

Rank shrugged. “I have many secrets. We could let them out someday!” The yard was surrounded by a wall so they wouldn’t be able to go far.

Liyana felt a pleasant mischief lay its cool hand on her head again.

Rafik said, “Did you see that landlord of ours? He could use some exercise! If he chases them, he’ll get some!”

Liyana mused. “Shouldn’t we wait at least a week? Let’s establish ourselves as law-abiding lodgers first.”

“Then?”

A bus kicked up dust on the road after letting off a crowd of passengers. Their new neighbors who didn’t yet know they existed.

“Then we have fun.”

My father once said he’d like to paint every board of our house a different color.

Rafik tacked up bright travel posters from Poppy’s travel-agency friend on the freshly painted white walls of his room. He posted “New York” and “Portugal,” though he’d never been there, and “The Doors of Jerusalem” and “TEXAS USA,” the place he hoped to go someday.

Liyana said, “Did you get any for me?” Rafik said she could have “Lufthansa” but she didn’t want it. She’d never even flown on that airline.

In St. Louis, Liyana’s room had been painted a deep, delicious color called “Raisin.” Her walls looked like an art gallery arranged with block prints and dreamy watercolors by her friends. She had a bulletin board with silly pictures taken at people’s birthday parties and dried flowers and pages ripped from magazines that were too nice to throw away. The gleaming, golden eyes of a cat stared right at her in bed. She had a framed pastel
portrait her mother had sketched of her when she was two and fell asleep on the blue rug in the living room. Liyana loved it very much and would have brought it to Jerusalem, but she worried the glass in the frame might break. She didn’t bring Peachy’s needlepoint alphabet or her personal portrait of Peter Pan, either.

Liyana thought she’d try living with blank walls for a month or two.

It was just an experiment.

The city was a cake made of layers of time.

“I’m not going,” Liyana told Poppy.

They were talking about Sitti’s invitation to come out to the village so she could “teach her things” on weekends.

“Why doesn’t she want to teach Rafik things, too?”

“Because she’s a woman and she knows womanly things.”

“She can keep them.”

Poppy sighed, “Fifty years from now you will deeply regret this moment.” He turned and stalked down the hallway toward his own bedroom. That’s what he always said.
Fifty years from now I’m going to be very busy,
Liyana thought.

A few days before, Poppy had actually thumbed through a Bible looking for a quote he liked from the Psalms: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may
my right hand forget its cunning. May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.”

It made Liyana mad when he read it to her. Was there an underlying meaning? Was he saying she wasn’t acting happy enough to be here? She wasn’t in the mood to go shopping day after day to replenish their household supplies. She didn’t even act excited about their new white Toyota, which smelled like fresh carpet and roses inside. “We could drive to Damascus or Aleppo!” Poppy said, standing back proudly to admire his purchase. “Well, we might have trouble getting across the border….”

Mostly they would just be driving back and forth from Jerusalem to Ramallah to their house, which sat so neatly in between.

Every morning at breakfast, when Poppy greeted Rank and Liyana with his characteristic, “Good
morning!
And how are
you
today?” she felt like answering in a gloomier way. I’m fair.
I’m floundering. I’m lonesome
. Liyana begged Poppy to pass by their new post office box often to see if she had received any letters from home.
What was wrong with Claire?
She imagined Poppy watched her from the corner of his eye.

The Abbouds spent an entire exhausting weekend sightseeing nonstop around Jerusalem morning till night. Poppy wanted them to “get the lay of the land.”

He led them up winding alleyways and down ancient stairs to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher he’d been telling them about for years. The priests here were famous for arguing to get the best altars for their own services. Poppy had done his homework on the wall outside the door when he was a boy and once saw two priests have a fistfight, rolling in the dust.