Habibi (8 page)

The dim Chapel of Calvary held a mournful mural of Jesus lying arms outspread and dead on the cross after it was taken down and laid on the ground. Mary Magdalene pressed her head to his feet. Mrs. Abboud cried when she saw it. At the Garden of Gethsemane, she cried again. Jerusalem was not exactly fun and games. Liyana’s mother held a tissue to her eyes. “I’m just feeling very
moved
today, thinking of all Jesus went through—it’s so haunting to stand on these same spots.”

“There’s always controversy, you know—which spot is the exact one,” Poppy said.

“It’s close enough for me,” she said.

They walked along the crowded Via Dolorosa, where Jesus carried the cross and stopped at every
station, so Mrs. Abboud could read aloud from her guidebook. German pilgrims, Italians humming hymns, and Japanese travelers wearing small purple caps converged on the same narrow pathways.

At the Wailing Wall, Jews in
yarmulkes
were tucking tiny notes and prayers into cracks between stones. Rafik wanted to know how long the notes stayed there. The most famous mosque of Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock, gleamed golden against the sky.

The Abbouds trudged around the outside of the Old City while Poppy gave them a lesson in the gates—Damascus Gate, Herod’s Gate, Jaffa Gate, the New Gate, the Lion’s Gate (also known as St. Stephen’s Gate), and—their favorite—the Dung Gate. Rafik and Liyana debated how the Dung Gate might have gotten its name.

They stopped at a hundred miniature stores with crooked floors so Poppy could greet the owners, kiss-kiss on both cheeks, introduce the family, and be offered coffee or tea, though he kept saying no. He said they had too many places to go to sit down anywhere.

“Everybody is a cousin of somebody and Poppy knows them all,” Liyana sighed to Rank.

“Yep,” said Rafik, “but will you remember a single person you’ve seen? Good luck!”

Liyana knew she would remember sensitive-looking Bassam, who ran a spice shop, because he had a poster of the Hindu elephant-headed god Ganesha on the wall of his shop and that seemed a little—unusual—here.

Liyana and Rafik wanted to buy something from every food stand, but Poppy begged them to wait till their “very large and special lunch.” As he greeted some ancient melon vendors who had known their grandfather, Liyana’s eyes fell on a young man, who appeared to be a dwarf, weighing bananas on an old-fashioned hanging scale. He stood on a tall wooden crate behind his cart. His bananas were stubby and short themselves, more like exclamation points than parentheses.

He wore an orange stocking cap though the weather was warm. His tiny blue jeans must have been made for a boy. And his face looked as stony as the streets of the city—chiseled and sharply defined. He didn’t smile even when he had three customers lined up. He just nodded and weighed their bananas. Liyana kept staring at him, the way she always picked one person in any crowd to stare at. She said to Rafik, “See that banana man? I’ll remember
him
. On the day I see him smile, I’ll buy a banana.” Maybe he was sad because he was short, or he had wanted to do something else in his life.

“Where are the camels, anyway?” Rafik asked
Poppy. “I was hoping for camels.” Poppy said they might see a few out in the desert toward Jericho, so immediately they begged him to take them there instead.

Liyana groaned, “Our feet are killing us. Also we’re expiring from hunger. Isn’t history better in small doses?”

“My precious children!” Poppy exclaimed.

They ate lunch in a famous underground Arabic restaurant, full of Oriental rugs, called
The Philadelphia
. Poppy gripped a waiter’s wrist and introduced him around the table. “This young man’s father,” he said, “was the smartest student in my high school chemistry class!” Liyana noticed another handsome young waiter watching her as he rolled silverware into white linen napkins and stacked them in a mound. Did he wink? She thought he winked.

The owner, a nice man about Poppy’s age, brought them steaming bowls of aromatic lentil soup, saying once they tasted it, they would keep coming back for more. The table filled up with olives, purple marinated turnips, plates of
baba ghanouj
and
hummus,
and hot flat breads, even before the real lunch came.

Liyana was feeling better by the minute. “With so much holiness bumping up against other holiness, doesn’t it seem strange Jerusalem would
have had so much fighting?” she said. Liyana was thinking of her teacher Mr. Hathaway back home, remembering the skeptical way he lifted one eye-brow any time she spoke.

“Think about dinner tables,” her mother said.

“Huh?”

“How many fights there are in families, every day. People in families love each other, or want to love each other, but they fight anyway. With strangers you don’t care so much. Think about it.”

“Yeah,” said Rafik, “if you didn’t love someone, why would you even
bother
to fight with him?”

Poppy patted him. “My son, more a philosopher every day!”

“Do you think the Arabs and Jews secretly love one another?” Liyana asked.

“I think,” Poppy said, “they are bonded for life. Whether they like it or not. Like that kind of glue that won’t let go.”

Two strong rays of light entered the subterranean restaurant through high-up windows along the street. One sunbeam fell directly onto the octagonal center design of a blue Oriental rug and the other lit up the red head of a very old lady. Poppy whispered, “See her hair? She dyes it with henna.”

“That’s what I’ll do after I get my eagle tattoo,” Rafik whispered.

“Being here with you all, I feel my heart has come back into my body.” Poppy lifted a teacup and smiled.

Still, Liyana noticed Poppy didn’t take them over to western Jewish Jerusalem for any kind of tour. He said he “didn’t know it” and they might have to get a tour bus for that. The handsome waiter slipped a plate of
baklava
onto their table for dessert. They hadn’t even ordered it.

Air was grinning around them.

Rafik was going to attend the Friends Girls School in Ramallah, even though he was a boy. The school accepted a few boys, too. It had been started by Quakers long ago and had a sunny campus with pots of geraniums lining the front steps.

Liyana’s mother seemed happy because the schoolyard where Rafik would spend his recesses was surrounded by a high stone wall. She’d recently started talking about “safety” in a way that made Liyana jumpy. Liyana never thought about safety unless someone else brought it up. She didn’t
want
to think about it, either. She wanted to live in an unlocked world.

Poppy and Mom did some research regarding Liyana’s high school education and decided she might do best at an Armenian school called St. Tarkmanchatz deep in the Armenian district of the Old City.

The students there were trilingual, speaking
Arabic, Armenian, and English, three languages with completely different alphabets.

“Are the classes like a three-channel television set? What will I do when they’re on the other channels? Will they think I’m a dunce for speaking only English?” Liyana asked Poppy. She was worried.

Liyana and Poppy went into town for the interview with the headmaster. They entered a huge iron door that led into the Armenian sector of the Old City and wandered the curling streets as if they were in a maze. The streets were unevenly paved and Liyana kept tripping. Poppy paused to gaze around them, saying, “I haven’t been on these streets since I was a boy.”

An old man sold roasted peanuts on a corner. When Poppy asked him in Arabic for the school, he pointed to an ancient building right ahead of them. The sign over the school’s door was in Armenian—they could only read 1929.

Inside the main office sat a priest in a long burgundy robe wearing a giant pointed hat, or crown. Liyana wasn’t sure what you would call the burgundy triangle sitting straight up on top of his head. Headgear? She tried not to stare at it.

He rose to shake hands, then waved them to sit on two rickety wooden chairs, speaking to Liyana in a careful, formal voice. “Do you know much about the Armenians?”

“I know they have a long and troubled history, like everyone else over here,” Liyana said, equally carefully. “I know there was a terrible massacre of Armenian people, but I couldn’t say the exact year. I’m sorry it happened.”

“And you know that’s why many in our community came to live in exile so far from our original homeland?”

She nodded. She was afraid he might ask her to say the Armenian alphabet or something, which she certainly didn’t know.

A fan spun and a water cooler clicked. All the books on his shelf were in Armenian.

Then something wonderful occurred to Liyana.

“I love William Saroyan.”

“Who?”

When she said, “The great Armenian-American writer who lived and wrote in California,” he said, “Oh yes, oh yes!”

When Liyana was in seventh grade, her class had a story by Saroyan in their textbook. She looked up more of his works at the library and read “The Pomegranate Trees” out loud to Poppy. They laughed so hard, Poppy couldn’t catch his breath. He lay down on the floor laughing, absolutely overcome. Later he said the wacky conversations in the story reminded him of his own family.

Liyana leaned toward the priest, suddenly
inspired. “I feel very close to what I know of Armenian culture through Saroyan’s stories and look forward to learning even more.”

That’s when the air in the room changed. The priest leaned forward, too. His hat slipped a little. “So you are interested in our culture?”

“Absolutely.”

Above their heads invisible angels started clapping.

The priest enrolled her, though she wasn’t even one-fourth or one-eighth Armenian. He said she would be the only “outsider,” a term that made her father flinch. Poppy spoke heartily, “Let’s believe together in a world where no one is inside or outside, yes?” The priest didn’t answer, but Liyana felt proud of Poppy for saying it.

Shaking hands again, the priest noticed the plain silver ring, her gift from Claire, on Liyana’s finger and said, “I’m sorry, but you will note when you read our handbook that rings are not allowed in our school.”

“Why is that?” Liyana asked.

“Distraction.”

Poppy gave her side a meaningful poke that translated, “Ask no more.”

Walking back through the narrow, winding streets to find their car, Poppy said, “Great idea you had, bringing up Saroyan.”

Liyana said, “Distraction? If I were wearing a giant cosmic cone on my head, would I have room to talk?”

“Genetics” means we have the same little bowties in our blood.

The beginning of school felt awkward for Liyana. She told her parents she didn’t want to make any judgments till a month had passed. Liyana said to Rafik, “I would like to go to school with the donkeys in the field. To stand all day in the free air with an open mouth. No bells ringing.”

Rafik shrugged and said, “Too bad for you. Maybe you’ll like it soon.” He said his school was a “piece of cake.”

One day when Liyana returned from school by public bus, a lady she’d never seen before was sitting in their living room on the low couch. She rocked back and forth in her long, blue village dress, humming to herself.

Liyana nodded at her and went off to find her mother, who was in the bedroom digging through a box.

“Who’s that lady in the living room?”

“I don’t know. She showed up this morning and hasn’t left. She doesn’t speak a word of English. I kept hoping Poppy would come home for lunch today and help me out.”

“Did you call him?” (Poppy had worked some magic with the phone company and gotten their phone installed within a week after all.)

“I did. He talked to her at length, but when I got back on, he said he hadn’t the foggiest idea. She claimed to be his relative.”

“So she’s been sitting in there all day?”

“All day. I tried to feed her, but she waved the food away. I think she’s shy.”

“What are you looking for?”

“A packet of old pictures, the only ones Poppy has, to see if she might look through them and recognize people. Maybe that could give us a clue.”

They found the pictures in a puffy envelope and the lady nodded for every one of them.

When Rafik came home after soccer practice, he said, “Who’s that?”

“She’s the sister of the Lost Pharoah,” Liyana told him.

“Who’s the Lost Pharoah?”