Habibi (19 page)

In Ramallah, Poppy stopped at a store open late for plumbing parts, so he could engage a plumber to head to Sitti’s house the next day. At home, their mother was frantic. She met them at the top
of the steps. “No note? Do you realize what
time
it is?”

After Rafik told what had happened, she was silent. Then she shouted, “NO! That poor little bathroom! But why? Why the bathroom?”

Liyana quoted, “There is no why.” It was strange how quickly someone else’s words could come out of your mouth. Idly lifting the front section of the newspaper, she read that a Jewish deputy mayor of Jerusalem proposed two thousand Arab homes in east Jerusalem be torn down to make room for fifty thousand houses for Jews. It didn’t say anything about pain or attachment or sorrow or honor.

Liyana slipped outside with the front page and the box of kitchen matches.

On a bare patch of earth, Liyana lit two edges of newspaper. They caught slowly at first, then burst into a cone of bright flame. The fire ate the words. Fire ate them inside and out. Liyana blew the ashes into the dust.

Later Sitti would tell them her new bathtub swallowed water with the sound of a cow.

Before anything was written, where was I?

That night Liyana dreamed a cake fell off its plate into the sea and floated away from her. She reached wildly with both her arms, standing kneedeep in the pull of powerful waves.

And it was Omer she was calling to. “Save it! Can you reach it?” but he was swimming too far out. Then she was shouting and waving, “I’m sorry! I wanted to share it with you!” but he could not hear her. He was swimming the other direction. And the cake was drowning.

When Liyana woke on her birthday, her mother was singing in the hallway. Poppy joined in off-key as he stepped into the bathroom and Rank pretended to be playing a trombone. “Pancakes for breakfast!”

Liyana’s place at the breakfast table was surrounded by cheerful hand-drawn cards with yellow Magic Marker daisies. “A decade and a half!” Rafik had written. “Is that an antique yet?”

Poppy wrote half his card in English and half in Arabic. “To my soon-to-be-bilingual daughter,”
the English said. Liyana could make out letters in Arabic by now—ones that looked like chimneys or fluted edges, but she couldn’t really make out
words
yet. So he helped her read it.
“I’m proud of you. What a year it’s been!”

Mom’s just said, “To my queen—at 15” in calligraphy. She was already stirring up batter for a pineapple upside-down cake, Liyana’s favorite. “I had a weird dream about a cake,” Liyana said.

When Poppy went downstairs to get his gift for Liyana out of the trunk of the car (fifteen new notebooks, including some fancy European ones, and fifteen new pens), he found a mysterious silver package sitting on the step. He carried it upstairs held far out from his body, saying, “Isn’t it sad what one thinks about these days? Should we get a bomb-sniffing dog? In the old days people never thought about such things.”

Since it had Liyana’s name handwritten and spelled correctly on a card at the top, she opened it and gasped.

Inside was the green lamp she’d first asked Omer about, at the Sandrounis’ ceramics shop, the one too expensive to buy for herself.

A tightly folded note was taped to it. “Don’t worry, I traded labor, not cash. Happy birthday! Omer.”

Liyana wondered how he got to her house so
early to deliver it. He must have taken a taxi from Jerusalem, dropped it off, and ridden the same taxi back.

Poppy said dourly, “Is this an appropriate gift for a young man to give a young woman?”

Her mother said, “It’s fine! It’s not jewelry or clothing. It’s not silver or gold. Don’t give her any trouble!”

All day at school, when Liyana described the scene of Sitti’s bathroom smashing, the chips of ceramic and waterlogged rooms, her classmates shrugged. People got used to disasters. No one was even killed.

Liyana felt distracted during class. She always had mixed feelings on her birthdays. She gazed out the school window at the changing clouds, casting a flurry of words toward Omer’s side of the city.
I miss you. I want to see you. You would never do something like those soldiers did.
But she wrote only five words down in her new notebook:
I love your amazing memory.

I would like to know the story of every little thing.

Rafik and Liyana dressed one of the sleeping chickens in the henhouse in a brocade tunic Liyana had sewn especially for her, from a wide silver and burgundy scrap her friend Bilal had given her. They imagined what it would be like for Imm Janan, their landlord’s sleepy wife, to discover her hen wearing a lavish robe, as if she’d been crowned queen at midnight.

Liyana had had a hard time sewing the thing so the hen’s legs could poke out where they needed to. She even “fitted her” once, in the dark. Rafik wanted Liyana to sew a bonnet as well, but she thought that might be a little much.

The hen mumbled cozily in their hands. Liyana said, “I hope this won’t give her bad dreams or anything.” Once the robe was tied on and the hen’s legs came through the bottom, she rippled her body back and forth, as if to see how much she could still move. Did she think it was a new suit of feathers?

They photographed her with their mother’s flash camera, which seemed to upset her more than the dress did.

Rafik said, “I don’t think she likes having her wings pressed down.” But she settled back into her nest and closed her eyes.

The next morning they were anxious to get to the American Library, where they often went on Saturdays to do their hideous homework. Afterward they’d meet Poppy for lunch and have minty ice cream at the YMCA next door. At breakfast, Rank kept glancing out the window toward the henhouse. He said, “Drive us, Poppy, let’s go now!” What if Imm Janan saw the chicken and screamed instead of laughed? They wanted to be gone when she discovered it.

At their gleaming library table, Liyana felt distracted. She kept getting up to pull reference books off the shelves and flip through their pages. She found some really old ones about Palestine with intricate drawings of the Old City in them. In a 1926 book called
Life in Palestine When Jesus Lived,
she read, “… the people were constantly at work… How many languages were spoken, what differences of color, look, habit, manner, dress, must have been seen!”

On her birthday after school, she had called Omer to thank him for the wonderful surprise, and his mother, who didn’t speak English very well, answered the phone. Liyana had to ask for him three times.

Omer seemed shy when she raved over her lamp. He just said, “Read some good books under it, okay?” and asked what she had been doing lately. They hadn’t been able to share their lunch breaks for a few weeks since he’d been practicing for a debate tournament with his team at lunchtime. Liyana had mentioned more than once that she and Rafik would be studying at the American Library in Jerusalem on Saturday. Now she kept hoping secretly Omer would show up.

So when the heavy green library door squeaked open again, after admitting nuns and the Italian man who ran the matches factory and his daughters and six blond tourists with turquoise backpacks, and Omer finally stepped through, wearing a checkered yellow shirt and looking quizzical, Liyana rose joyously to greet him and they hugged tightly for the first time. She pressed her face against his shoulder. It smelled like sun.

Liyana introduced Omer to Rafik, who said only, “Is it true you play soccer?”

Omer folded a small
origami
ball for him from a piece of notebook paper, and batted it across the
table. “I made the ball so you make the goal,” he whispered.

They tackled their respective heaps of homework, whispering, laughing, and joking till the librarian stood over their table, saying, “You will please keep your silence or I will be forced to ask you to leave.” Then it was harder than ever not to laugh.

Liyana was writing about Mark Twain, since he too had lived in Missouri, her old state, and no one else in her class had chosen an American for their author’s report. Everyone else was doing someone like Shakespeare, Dante, or John Milton. When she went to search for the library’s tattered copy of
Huckleberry Finn
on the far shelves of “Fiction”—to compare the older edition with her own—Omer walked to the end of the same aisle to study the giant Map of the World on the wall, copying some town names from Russia in his notebook. “We have to write about the places our ancestors came from,” he said. She had not known his grandparents were from Russia till now.

Liyana kept thinking how everybody was a little like everybody else and nobody was the
same
. She thought of those snowflake and fingerprint stories about the perfect uniqueness of each one and wondered, “Are we supposed to feel good about that?” She
wanted
one snowflake to resemble another one now and then. She even
imagined she carried some essence of Mark Twain inside herself, which was why he appealed to her so much. Twain didn’t like the Middle East, though. She wouldn’t quote anything he’d said on his dopey travels through the Middle East.

Somehow she couldn’t bear to return to their table while Omer still stood at the end of the aisle. She felt suspended, reading spines of other books, held fast by his presence close by. She whispered
chillywilly
under her breath. He turned, then, and caught her staring at his back. He came over beside her and whispered, “What are you thinking about?”

Her throat felt thick with a wish to say, simply, “You” but she said, “Mark Twain.”

He touched her elbow gently, leaned forward, and placed his beautiful mouth on hers.

A kiss. Wild river. Sudden over stones. As startling as the first time, but nicer, since it happened in the light.

And bigger than the whole deep ache of blue.

It didn’t go away right away.

It held, as Omer gently held her elbow cupped in his hand. Warmth spilled between them.

“Liyana,” he said. “I—like you.”

“Oh!” She said, “Me too. I like
you
.”

He said, “You are not—mad?”

“No!”

He smiled, “I don’t think the books—are mad.” He kissed her again, on her right cheek only, delicately as a feather’s touch, and the librarian pushed a cart past their aisle, not even glancing in their direction.