Habibi (22 page)

Poppy rushed to the lady’s side. He carried smelling salts in his pocket for such occasions. He carried aspirins and nitroglycerin tablets and who knew what else. He leaned over and spoke to the fallen lady gently. She didn’t seem very hurt. She kept arranging her hair. Poppy took her pulse and whispered to her while someone called a taxi to drive her back to her hotel. She said she didn’t need to go to a hospital and that she fainted every time she got “emotional.”

She had disrupted the final prayer. As a few Americans started singing “How Great Thou Art,” to fill in the space, Liyana’s eyes traveled curiously around the group. She felt startled to see her secretly famous banana seller standing off to the right, wearing ax bulky blue sweater much too large for him. He’d been hidden behind someone till people began moving around. His hands were poked up high in either sleeve. Liyana had never seen him without his cart before. She poked Rafik and whispered, “Look who’s here!”

Poppy helped the weak-kneed lady into the
car, then turned to Liyana as it disappeared. He was grinning. “You know what? She thought this snow was a miracle—it swept her away!”

Behind Poppy, the dwarf broke into the first smile Liyana had ever seen on his face. He said, in Arabic,
“Mabruk”
—“Congratulations!”

Liyana reached toward him to shake his hand.

“Fee mooz?”
she asked, which meant something like, “Do you have a banana?” Or maybe it meant, “
Is there
a banana?” which sounded a little foolish if you considered it.

Miraculously, as miraculous as snow on Easter and strangers passing out onto the ground, the small, smiling man pulled a stubby banana from his pants pocket and handed it to her. She tried to press a coin from her wallet into his hand, but he waved it away, laughing heartily, saying Arabic words she couldn’t understand.

Poppy looked startled by this odd transaction. “What’s going on?” he said.

Liyana dangled her prize banana in front of his nose. A yellow banana in the white, white snow.

Rafik said, “It’s an Easter egg.”

Teach me to sew a vine of stars.

One day at lunchtime, after buying a slightly tattered two-months-old American women’s magazine at the newsstand as a surprise for her mother, Liyana heard her name floating above the idling taxis near the King David Hotel. She raised her head to the sky as if a bird had called her.

Then Omer appeared, sprinting up to her startled side, and said, “You didn’t tell me your name means a vine! I found it spelled almost the same way in the dictionary—a tropical rain- forest vine. It roots in the ground.”

Liyana grinned. “Where have you
been?
”

“Where have
you
been?”

He said, “I was going to call you last night.” It seemed like a thin little lie anybody might say, but she liked it.

Omer wanted to invite her to a poetry reading by local poets at his school that evening. She said she’d have to see if one of her parents could drive her, since it was at night. He drew a map to his school on the back of a grocery list written in Hebrew from his pocket.

“Do you still have my number?” he asked.

Liyana thought, Oh
please
.

“Well,” he grinned, “you did not use it recently, so I could not be sure.”

He held her elbow for a moment before she ran off toward the Armenian Quarter and her Arabic class, which was already two minutes into its lesson on how to ask questions.

Again, as it had before when Liyana saw Omer at lunchtime, the afternoon puffed up lightly, joyously, a delicate pastry, a sweetened shell of hours.

On the local bus home, everything still shone in the light of Omer’s smile. The cracked bus seats, squealing brakes, ladies with huge plastic bags of fresh bread, the bus driver’s bald head, were shining, shining.

“Shookran!”
Liyana exclaimed to the driver, climbing down at her stop.
“Thank you!”

She was not usually so enthusiastic.

The driver lifted his hands from the wheel and shimmied them in the air, laughing at her.
“AlhamÙdulAllah!”

Praise be to God
—that a day could unfold with surprise invitations. Liyana leapt upstairs two steps at a time.

But she was met by her brother with a stunned look on his face. “Khaled’s been shot,” he said. “And Poppy’s in jail.”

A story is a seam in a dress—some days it unravels.

“What?” screamed Liyana. “What do you mean? Where is Mom?”

She dropped her school bag onto the floor.

“Mom went off in a Palestinian police car. She made me stay here to tell you. She is very very upset.” Rafik looked bleary-eyed.

“How do these things go together?”

“What things?”

“Khaled and Poppy!”

“I don’t know,” he sobbed. “I’m telling you everything she told me. Ismael’s father dropped me off here after school and Mom was blazing out the door into a police car that was parked out back, this strange kind of car I don’t even know the name of, and I didn’t get any more details.”

“ALWAYS get details!”

Liyana rushed into the kitchen and stared at the phone. She had no idea whom to call. In this country you didn’t call 911. “Let’s go down to the camp and find Nadine,” she said. “Maybe Nadine can tell us something.”

Liyana and Rafik galloped down the road without speaking. The refugee camp looked more topsy-turvy than usual. Beat-up cars sat at odd angles out front, as if people had jumped from them without parking. A sack of pita bread lay scattered on the ground. A heap of smoking rubber tires polluted the air. And a crowd of teenaged boys huddled together by the small house with the blue-painted front door where Khaled and Nadine lived with their parents.

“Hello!” Liyana shouted to the boys. “Please,
wane
Nadine?”

The boys yelled in unison, “Nadine!”

Nadine came to her window and peered out anxiously.

“Yallah!”
Liyana yelled to her. “Quickly! We need to talk to you!”

Nadine came stepping out of the house with bare feet. She was shivering. Where were her shoes? Where was her shy mother, Abla, who often served small plates of delicious sweets and figs to Liyana and Rafik?

“Where is your mother?” Liyana said.

Nadine cried, “She went hospital with Khaled. He was bad, bad! Shot!”

“We heard that! It’s terrible! But—who shot him?”

Nadine said the word for “soldiers” and covered her eyes.

Liyana stared at Rafik, baffled. “So how did Poppy get into this?” Of course she had never considered that their father, who could not even trap a mouse, had shot their friend, but the connections seemed jumbled.

“You father—he come run—from you house,” explained Nadine. “He see the soldiers—no like it. He come run, he wave arms,” she demonstrated, waving wildly. “The soldiers call
Khaled!
—
come out house!
Khaled no come out.” She used the Arabic word for “scared.” She was crying hard now. “The soldiers say,
Yallah! Yallah!
The soldiers mad! Khaled come out, turn round and the soldier shoot! Khaled fall down. Is bad, bad! You father run to soldier, say
No! No!
He stop him.” She threw her arm.

Liyana was staring open-mouthed.

Rafik said, “He
hit
the soldier?”

“No, no, no hit, just …” She showed them. Poppy had pulled the soldier’s arm back. Hard.

Liyana covered her mouth. Rafik asked, “The arm that had a gun in it?” but Nadine didn’t
understand. Nadine said the ambulance came for Khaled and the soldiers took Poppy. They pushed him into a car.

Now everybody was crying. Liyana was crying. “Which hospital?” she wailed. “And where is the jail?”

One of Khaled’s cousins knew where the jail was. He’d been in it twice himself. He didn’t look very happy about going back there. But he walked quickly with Liyana and Rafik to the Abbouds’ house to call a taxi.

When they reached Jerusalem, after passing the usual daily things—vegetable carts, sheep, stores, family vineyards propped on poles—the taxi turned sharply onto a gray industrial-looking street.

At the grim-faced jail, Liyana strode up to three Israeli soldiers guarding the front and said, “Please, I need to see my father, Dr. Kamal Abboud. He hasn’t been here long. He came—maybe an hour ago.”

One soldier sitting on a crate lifted his eyes sleepily from the orange he was peeling. “Not possible,” he said. She could smell the fragrant orange scent rising from his hands.

Something shifted inside her. It trembled and
could have turned her away. Her throat felt shaky. But she didn’t turn. She stomped her foot on the pavement, raising her leg twice and pounding her foot down as hard as she could. Liyana stomped her foot at the soldiers. “Of
course
it’s possible!” she said loudly. “He is my
father!
I need to see him! NOW! PLEASE! It’s necessary! I must go in this minute!”

The soldiers looked her up and down. She was still wearing her navy blue school uniform with its rumpled white cotton blouse. The soldier with the orange sighed heavily, as if she were really irritating him. He dropped the peelings into a sack, wiped his hands, and said, “Come.” But another soldier put his arm up and made Rafik stay out front, which made him furious.

The first soldier took Liyana into an office, shone a hot spotlight into her face, and photographed her. He asked her name, age, school, her phone number, and address, barking his questions. He asked two more times what she wanted and she repeated, “To see my father.” Did he have a bad memory? The second time she spoke calmly and slowly. He took the embroidered purse Sitti had made and said she could not take it in. She watched him toss it onto a dirty table cluttered
with empty coffee cups. He said she could not stay long.

Liyana followed the soldier down a gloomy hall, staring into dark cells as her eyes adjusted. Sleeping bodies lay wrapped in blankets on cots. Some cubicles had high slits for windows, but some had none. One man stood tall in the center of his cell, staring straight toward the hall where she walked, his hands held behind his back. His face looked blank. It was strange to walk through a jail. What were the prisoners’ stories? How long had they been here? Had they done anything worse than her father had?

Poppy sat on a wooden stool in a cell bent over with his head in his hands. Usually he only sat this way when one of his patients was dying. Her mother was nowhere to be seen. A small moan escaped from Poppy’s mouth when he saw her through the iron bars, but he wasn’t crying. The air smelled dank and sour.

“Habibti!”
he said.
“No no no!
What in the world are you doing here? How did you get in? This is no place for you!”

“Or you either,” Liyana said, gripping a bar. It was strange how calm she felt the minute she entered his presence. “Poppy! We have to help you get out!”

He said, “I’m working on it. Liyana, don’t
worry. I’ll be out soon. It’s a big mistake. Take care of yourself! Go home! Stay safe!” The soldier stood behind Liyana with his arms folded.