Habibi (15 page)

At dinner that night, Liyana did not tell her parents about her new friend. But she asked Poppy, “Have we ever had anyone in our family named Omar?” and he looked puzzled.

“Well, I think way back when your grandfather was young and he used to ride his Arabian horse from the village all the way up to Galilee just to eat the tiny crispy fish that were caught in the sea—then I think we might have had an Omar. Why?”

“Did you know him?”

“No. Maybe I heard a story about him. It’s a common name, you know.”

Later, as they ate rice pudding, Poppy added, “I met the famous actor, Omar Sharif, in a tiny café in Egypt once. Did I ever tell you that? We shared a table because there weren’t many tables. He asked me what I did and I said I was getting ready to go to medical school. Then I asked, ‘What about you?’”

“I’m an actor,” Ornar Sharif said. “I’m getting ready to be a famous actor.”

Liyana opened her eyes wider. “Wow, he
knew that? Before it happened?
”

Poppy said, “I had never heard of him. So I answered cockily, if you can believe it—
Isn’t everybody an actor?
”

At Abu Musa’s café, neither Liyana nor Or ordered yogurt. They ordered
hummus,
which came swirled with sprigs of parsley for garnish. They sat at a crooked table outside, dipping their breads into the same creamy plate.

“Did you always live here in Jerusalem?” Liyana asked him and he said, “Always—forever and ever—from the time of the—infinite sorrows—till now.”

She liked how he talked. His English was very flowing.

“Do you hope to live in Jerusalem forever?”

She felt like an interviewer. Tiny gray birds poked around their feet for crumbs and pecked at a paper wrapper. Did it taste of salt, of pomegranate syrup, of sesame? Did they fly around the city together or had they met just now for the first time? Liyana tossed them a stalk of parsley.

“Where else would somebody go, after here? Omaha?”

For some reason that struck her funny. Not that she had ever been to Omaha, but just the fact he would think of the
word
.

“I’m sure there are lots of immigrants who have gone to Omaha,” she told him.

“But a place is inside you—like a part of your body, don’t you think? Like a liver or kidney? So how could you leave it? It sounds like big trouble to me.”

She stared at the table. The patterned grains of wood in the scarred surface reminded her of currents in the Mississippi River. Would she ever smell that muggy air again?

“But what do
you
think?” he continued. “Didn’t you come here from another place? Do you think I’m wrong?”

A sparrow landed right on her foot and jumped off again. “I’m from St. Louis,” she said softly. “Just—a city. Like—Omaha. I don’t think you’re wrong. But—do you think you can get your kidney back?”

He tapped his finger on the tabletop. He stared at her in a soft way that made her feel warm. Then he said, “I hope so.”

Old men were trudging up the skinny street with baskets of kindling tied to their backs. Liyana took a big sip of her lemonade. She felt saddened by their conversation but glad to be mentioning it, at least.

“What do you
do
all the time?” Liyana said. “Where do you go when you’re not in school?”

He looked around. She liked the straight line of his jaw, his skin’s rich olive tint. “Well, I walk. I walk a lot. I go to the Sandrounis’, and the museums, and the libraries, and the soccer fields, and the beach sometimes in summers—do you go to the beach?—and the green country around Nazareth, where my mother is from—have you been there?”

They ordered a bowl of
baba ghanouj
because they were still hungry.

He said tentatively, “I’m also very happy to stay at my house and read books and listen to music.”

He had careful fingers. He tore his bread into neat triangles, not ripped hunks, as Rafik did. He offered her more before he took any himself. Liyana realized she was staring at the subtle valley above his upper lip, the small elegant dip under his nose. Did everybody have one of those?

She was staring at his wrist, the graceful way it came out of his sleeve.

“Have you heard any of the new folk music over here?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “But I would like to.”

He invited her to meet him on Saturday at 1
P.M.
at a coffeehouse called “The Fountain” where
they had live local music on weekends. “They have orange juice, too—if you don’t drink coffee.”

She wished she had a pocket calendar. She’d fill in every day.

When they parted to return to their own schools, he took her hand formally and shook it. “Liyana, it was a real pleasure talking with you. Better than most days of my life! And I look forward to our next visit.”

“Or,” she said, hesitating a moment, because it felt like calling somebody “And” or “But.” “Or—I enjoyed it—too.”

He gripped her hand a moment extra.

Sometimes to hold a good secret inside you made the rest of a day feel glittery. You could move through dull moments without any pain.

All afternoon at her desk, Liyana felt lifted up by the glint of her secret. An invisible humming engine shone a small spotlight onto one corner of her desk, to the upper right of the geometry text, and the triangles they were studying all looked like bread.

If you could be anyone, would you choose to be yourself?

The day after Thanksgiving, which no one else in Jerusalem even mentioned, much less celebrated, Liyana’s family sat on the low couches in the living room after dinner reading different sections of newspaper when she blurted out her plan.

“Fountain? Fountain? Never heard of it,” said Poppy.

“You’ve never taken the bus alone into the city,” said her mother, putting down her page.

“Well, it can’t be very hard,” Liyana answered testily. “I mean, I’ve taken it coming home, right? Is there a huge difference? On our road it only goes north to Ramallah and south to Jerusalem. I’ll take the south one. Then, when I see the city, which I
do
recognize by now, I’ll get off. Then I’ll walk.”

“Walk?” they said in unison.

Every day Liyana’s father drove her into
Jerusalem, letting her off by Jaffa Gate so she could walk into the Armenian Quarter by herself and go to school. At lunch she hiked miles within the walled city, around curls and corners of tiny alleyways, up secretive staircases, along crowded thoroughfares smelling of oranges and rose water and damp, mopped stone. And now they acted as if she’d never walked before.

“How did you hear of this place? Do your friends at school go there?”

“Well—they
might
if they know about it.”

Actually she hadn’t mentioned it to any of them. She was still keeping it a secret rolled up tightly inside her.

“Was it in the newspaper?”

“Maybe.” So she spread the back pages from both newspapers on the floor and started scouring them. All she found were ads for purchasing a “beautifully sculpted charm replica of the Second Holy Temple in Jerusalem” and a concert by the Jerusalem Woodwind Quintet (the Jewish paper) and giant obituaries and restaurant ads (the Arabic paper).

She stomped into her room and fell down backward on her bed.

A little later, Liyana’s mom stepped into the
doorway of her room and smiled the motherly smile that says,
“I know where you are and I remember being there myself.”

Her mother said, “You know, I have a few errands in the city myself. Would that make things easier? If I drove you and dropped you off and came back to get you?”

“What are your errands?”

“Well, I need to go to a tailor, for one. The two denim skirts I bought right before we left the States are a little too big. I should have tried them on.”

“That will take about ten seconds.”

“And I’d like to find the vitamin store I heard about. We’re running out of Cs and Es. And I need to explore more of the Jewish neighborhoods on foot because I want to find out what’s—available. You know how Poppy only takes us around east Jerusalem because he doesn’t
know
the other side? Well, I’m ready to discover it. All that might give you two hours or more.”

Saturday arrived and Liyana rebraided her hair ten times. Then she brushed it and decided to leave it loose. It had little waves in it from all the activity. Her mother, who was not yet used to driving in the city, still pumped the gas hesitantly and everyone passed them. Even very old men passed them.
Liyana said, “Mom, I’m meeting a friend there.”

“From school?”

“Not my school.”

“A girl?”

“Not a girl.”

Her mother’s foot hit the brake a little. “You mean—this is—a date?”

“Not a date. It’s an—appointment.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s Or.”

“What?”

“For Omar. I met him—at the Sandrounis’ ceramics shop. The place Poppy showed me. I was—just in there—a few times.”

“He works there?”

“No. They’re friends.”

Liyana could see right then she had rounded the bend where conversations with her parents were no longer going to be as easy as they once were.

“Do you know what your father would say?”