Habibi

by Naomi Shihab Nye

  Later Liyana wished she had chased him through the streets and hit him with her little spice bag. She could have swung it into his face till coriander clouded up his eyes.

  Bassam didn’t say a word. He turned away and busied himself brushing spice crumbs off his table.

  All the way home the words she hadn’t said kept crying out inside her. “I’m an animal, too! Oh, I’m so proud to be an animal, too!”

  She couldn’t tell Poppy. She felt she had betrayed him.

  What, she wondered, would Sitti have said?

  Sitti might have howled like a coyote.

  RAFIK’S WISHES

  He wished for a whole basket of yellow pomelo fruits, sweeter than grapefruits, to eat by himself.

  A German archaeologist was coming over for dinner. Rafik, starving as usual, flitted around their rooms saying, “I wish she’d hurry up. I wish I wish I wish.”

  “Bro, you’re always wishing,” Liyana said. She was reading about the old kings and queens of England for her history class. Now there was an unhappy group.

  Rafik wished he could do his homework sitting straight up in the salt of the Dead Sea. He wished he could dig a hole so deep, he’d find a lost city. Or a scroll.

  He wished someone would lower him into a well. When Poppy was a boy, he’d been lowered into a village well on ropes because his aunts and uncles wanted to know what was down there.

  Inside the musty hole, Poppy discovered secret shelves and shallow corridors dug into its sides above the water level. He shone his light on ancient clay jars. Maybe they’d been lined up there from biblical times.

  Poppy lifted out a deep blue vessel with a wide round mouth and a clay stopper. Small dried-up carob seeds rattled around inside.

  Dozens of village people came by to see it that night. “How many jars are down there?” they asked him.

  “Hundreds.”

  They had a town meeting about it. What should they do?

  Poppy kept shivering inside. What if he had seen bones? Skeletons and skulls?

  And why did the ancestors hide their jars inside a well, anyway? Maybe the jars were filled with precious oils back then. Maybe the well was a secret hiding place in case of invasion.

  The villagers decided not to tell anybody. If they told, no telling what would happen—already the countryside teemed with jeeps and foreigners and curious expeditions.

  Poppy said he could never look at a well in the same way again. He went back to his own family house in Jerusalem and started wondering what might be buried inside the walls.

  All this made Rafik want to discover something.

  “It’s part of your heritage,” Poppy told him. “Dig, dig, dig.”

  Finally the archaeologist appeared, smelling faintly of perspiration, and they dove into their cucumbermint soup. She wore a khaki shirt and a gold necklace charm shaped like a shovel. She told about the project she’d been digging on for ten years, in the desert near Jericho. “It takes patience” she said, looking at Liyana as if she didn’t have any. How did she know?

  Rafik asked her if he could apply for a job.

  She didn’t laugh. She said he could come out on a holiday sometime and she’d find tasks for him to do. He could carry buckets or sift through shards. He could be an apprentice. Then Liyana started getting interested, too.

  “Just today,” the archaeologist said, “we uncovered a rich cache of pottery chips painted blue.”

  Liyana and Rafik stared at Poppy meaningfully.

  Later, when the adults had a boring discussion about what was wrong with the world these days, Rafik wished they’d be quiet. He preferred talking about bones. He’d told Liyana that whenever adults started talking about “the world,” the air grew heavy. Liyana was impressed with him sometimes. She agreed.

  They wandered outside onto the balcony, just the two of them, and sat close together in the evening breeze facing west. Even though the Mediterranean loomed far out of sight, beyond hills, neighborhoods and coastal towns, Liyana imagined she could feel sea breezes brushing her face. Sometimes it seemed they were coming from another world.

  “Do you like it here?” she asked Rafik.

  To her greatest surprise, he answered, “Yes.”

  He hoped they would stay here forever.

  He liked it so much more than he had expected to.

  He didn’t even miss playing baseball in the back lot anymore. Soccer was better. And he certainly didn’t miss his piano lessons.

  For the first time, Liyana felt totally alone.

  FRIENDS

  How long does a friend take?

  One afternoon Rafik was working on definitions for his English vocabulary list and asked Liyana, “When does a person go from being an acquaintance to a friend? Where is the line?”

  Liyana said, “Hmmmm. The line. Well, do you have any what-you-would-call-friends here yet?”

  He thought about it. “Sure. Well, maybe. This guy Ismael in my class is my friend already. I might have more than that. Don’t you?”

  Liyana said, “Hmmmmmm.” He hated when she was in this mood.

  Rafik persisted. “Could becoming a friend take just a few minutes? So someone would be your acquaintance very briefly? Or could you skip that step and go straight to friend? And can it go the other way, too? Like, can you be friends first, then become only acquaintances later? If you don’t see each other anymore?”

  Liyana wanted to think her friends back home would always be her friends. She said, “I think friendships are—irrevocable. Once you’re friends you can’t turn back.”

  “What’s irrevocable? Another vocabulary word?”

  Something bad was happening today. A chain of Israeli military tanks lumbered up the road. Liyana stared out the window glumly. “It looks ugly out there.”

  The silver-lining theory made her think they should do something to change the mood in the air. It wasn’t hard to convince Rafik to drop his pencil. Having seen Imm Janan, their landlord’s wife, take the bus toward Ramallah thirty minutes before, they went downstairs to their stony, grassless backyard and unhinged the door to the chicken coop for the first time. The chickens stepped out, at first tentatively, then wildly, as if they’d been loosed from prison. They flapped their wings up and down. The happy hens scrabbled in the dirt for bugs and worms. Were there worms here, like back home? Did the whole world have worms?

  Liyana stooped to see a chicken gobble a plump green caterpillar. It wasn’t long, thin, or brownish like an earthworm. Rafik interrupted her reverie by screaming, “It’s leaving! One of the hens has flown away!”

  The hens were so fat, Liyana felt astonished they could fly. But one had indeed just taken off, over the whitewashed wall. Rafik and Liyana left the others, unlatched the gate, and went running after the vagrant.

  Down the road, past the looming cedar trees that looked as if they might once have circled a cemetery, the chicken did a mixed fly-flap-and-skid routine. She bounced onto the earth, taking off again so quickly, they couldn’t catch up with her. Rafik waved his arms as he ran. Liyana tried to keep up. “What will we do? She’s too fast!”

  They lost sight of her at the gate to the refugee camp. Liyana thought she had gone inside. “Oh no!” she wailed. “What if someone catches her and eats her?”

  But Rafik thought she had passed the camp and was heading down through low bushes and scraggly trees toward the runways at the abandoned airport. “She thinks she’s a jet plane!” he yelled. “She’s taking off!”

  Breathless, they ran around the perimeter of the airport, now strung with barbed-wire fences and signs that said NO ENTRY in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. “Do you see her in there?” Liyana called. But they saw only cracked pavement and dust.

  Would the chicken come home automatically at nightfall, like a homing pigeon or one of those movie dogs that walked a thousand miles by secret radar?

  “What if the other chickens have flown over the fence by now and Imm Janan has returned and the soldiers are circling o
ur yard?” Liyana asked.

  Rafik said what Poppy always said. “You’re a dramatist.”

  But then something great happened. Walking back toward home past the refugee camp, Liyana stared over the clutter of wires, posts, and sawhorses that made up its jagged boundary, and there, among clotheslines and ramshackle dwellings, she spotted one tall redheaded boy with their chicken cradled in his arms. He was petting it, his head down close to its face.

  “Hey!” Liyana called. “Hello! Marhaba!”

  The boy looked up and grinned. He called out something in Arabic that Liyana and Rafik couldn’t understand. Then he walked out the front gate of the camp and said, shyly, “Hello? He is—your bird?”

  “She,” Rafik said. “She is—girl bird.” Liyana couldn’t imagine being technical at a moment like this. She felt so relieved to see the wayward chicken again that she put her hand out enthusiastically to shake the boy’s free hand.

  “Ana Liyana,” she said, using the Arabic phrase for “I am Liyana” that pleased her, since it echoed so neatly.

  The boy said, “Ana Khaled.”

  Rafik said, “Ana Rafik”

  “You speak—Arabic?” Khaled asked.

  Rafik answered, “Not yet. You speak English?”

  Khaled said, “Maybe.”

  Liyana and Rafik laughed. Rafik asked, “What’s maybe in Arabic?”

  “Yimkin.”

  A younger girl with puffy red curls similar to Khaled’s ran up to them. She wore a loose pair of pants that looked like bloomers, and a pink T-shirt with Donald Duck on it. Khaled said, “This—Nadine. My—brother.”

  “No—your sister!” said Rafik.

  The chicken was trying hard to get away again. One taste of freedom had inspired it. Khaled seemed happy to hand it to Liyana.

  “You—tourist?”

  “No,” Liyana said. “We live in that house.” She pointed up the road. “Can you come over sometime and visit us?”

  Khaled looked at his sister, who looked hopeful. “You are—Araby?”

  This gave Liyana a chance to say her favorite new Arabic phrase. “Nos-nos.” Which meant, half-half. Somehow it sounded better in Arabic.

  Khaled and Nadine liked this a lot. They walked up the road with them, reaching over to pet the chicken as they went.

  At the back gate to the house, they all shook hands and laughed again. Nadine and Khaled pointed at the other chickens flapping around the yard and said, “Alham’dul-Allah!” which meant, Praise be to God!, and which Arab people used for nearly everything.

  “Come back!” Rafik said to them. “Come over soon!”

  After Liyana and Rafik had caught the rest of the chickens with great difficulty and latched them inside their pen, they dissolved in a flurry of giggles just as Imm Janan stepped off the bus out front with her loaded shopping bags. Liyana said to Rafik, “Khaled and Nadine. They’re nice. Now you tell me. Are they acquaintances or friends?”

  INVISIBLE

  Her mountain of notebooks hid under four folded black sweaters.

  Since his childhood, Poppy had been wishing for a hat that would make him invisible.

  Where would he go if he had one? Where would he travel?

  “I would travel in and out of the rooms where big decisions are made,” he said very seriously. “I would listen to things people say when they think no outsider is listening. When they make decisions that will affect other people. I would be their conscience, tugging at them quietly. And there would have been peace in Jerusalem long ago.”

  Rafik said, “I would be like Superman. I would fight crime and evil forces and no one would even see me.”

  “It’s a hat,” Liyana told him. “It’s not wings.”

  Their mother got all dreamy when Poppy said, “You put the hat on now—where will you go?” She would sit at the feet of great musicians and opera singers as they practiced. She would soak up their trills and scales, their perfect pitches. Or she would ride around in Mother Teresa’s pocket. She would shadow great saints and learn how to do selfless things for the world.

  “Mom,” Liyana said. “You’re doing that already.”

  “No,” she said, smiling. “I’m only doing it for you. I could do more.”

  What would Liyana do? She’d pop that invisible hat on her head, go to the airport, and get on a plane headed back to the United States. She would sit in First Class. She would curl up on somebody’s food tray with the real silverware and the china plates.

  Rafik said, “Let’s hope the hat has shrinking powers, too, and makes you tiny, the size of a salt shaker. Otherwise that tray’s going to tip.”

  Later Liyana would float around their old neighborhood, invisible as tree pollen, and see if anyone mentioned her.

  Maybe she was completely forgotten.

  She would drift in through Mrs. Mannino’s window and hang suspended over the kitchen sink while she washed dishes. Liyana still remembered what Mrs. Mannino’s coffee cups looked like, white with painted shafts of wheat tied together. She and Claire and Kelly Mannino drank spiced cider out of them.

  She would fly into Peachy Helen’s bedroom where Peachy was buttoning her satiny housecoat, and whisper, “Lavender’s blue, dilly-dilly, lavender’s green.” She’d click her invisible fingers, reciting rhymes Peachy taught her when she was very little. “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick.” Where was Jack now?

  Was his candle all burned out?

  NO MORE MEAT

  I will speak the language of animals and wipe their blood from my teeth.

  One day, when Poppy had taken the bus to work so Mrs. Abboud could pick up Rafik after soccer practice, Liyana rode along and they stopped first at a butcher shop to buy chicken for dinner. It was the first time Liyana had entered one here. She followed her mother into the stinky store crowded with stacked shelves of crooked stick and wire cages.

  The chickens in the cages were alive and cramped, jabbering, in their boxy prisons. They were not headless body parts on Styrofoam plates wrapped neatly in anonymous plastic in a refrigerated grocery compartment. They were not thighs, drumsticks, and breasts.

  Downy feathers from their soft chests stuck between the bars of the cages. Liyana pulled a feather free and smoothed her finger over it. The chickens were breathing, chattering, humming. They were looking at her. At each other. And lifting their wings.

  Her mother took a deep breath and said, “Wahad, min-fadlack.” One, please. Poppy had taught her the necessary phrases to get through a day. She seemed to be avoiding eye contact with the chickens herself. The butcher would let you pick your own chicken if you wanted to, but Liyana’s mother didn’t.

  Turning her back on the scene, Mom stared into the street as the butcher plunged his hand into a cage toward one very upset white chicken. Liyana didn’t want to see any of it either, but she couldn’t stop looking. He grabbed it roughly by its legs and it screamed. Then he swung it abruptly, upside down, so it went into shock and dangled limply a moment before he plopped it onto his bloody counter, grabbed the big knife, and slashed off its head.

  Liyana couldn’t help herself. “No!” She waved her arm as if to slap him.

  Her mother gripped her shoulder. “Oh, stop.”

  Liyana’s eyes filled up.

  She had eaten chicken hundreds of times, but she had never witnessed this scene before. She thought, It happens over and over and over.

  The chicken’s body trembled and writhed after the head was severed, then fell still. The butcher turned to plunge the body into a steaming pot, then deftly stripped the feathers off, wrapping the body in white paper.

  Did Liyana just imagine the other chickens grew much quieter for a moment? That a sheen of horror hung in the air? Each time a new person stepped into the shop, the chickens must worry.

  My turn.

  People might say chickens couldn’t worry, but something sensitive in their bodies must know.

  At that moment, full of the rotten stench of the shop,
Liyana’s poor mother handing her money over to the butcher, not liking it either but saying “Shookran,” in a tight voice, Liyana became a vegetarian.

  Her mother cooked the chicken’s body with tarragon leaves that had traveled in a plastic bag all the way from St. Louis. She served the chicken’s body over rice. Liyana took only rice.

  “Why aren’t you eating any?” Poppy asked.

  Rafik shouted, “Liyana’s on a diet! Someone told her she has pudgy cheeks!”

  Liyana held her fork straight up like a scepter. “It’s dead,” she announced loudly. “And it didn’t want to die.”

  RAFIK’S ESSAY ABOUT LIYANA

  My sister is a very unusual person and I don’t think she would mind to hear me call her that. She loves to read and walks around talking to herself. Or she can stay quiet for a really long time staring at something like an egg.

  She has a very primitive hairdo and wears mostly the same three shirts and blue jeans or one skirt over and over. She says she will never cut her hair or wear makeup in her life and if I paid her one hundred dollars she wouldn’t paint her fingernails red. Actually she looks younger than she is, which is almost fifteen.

  She doesn’t need lots of things to make her happy. In fact, money is one of her least favorite subjects. She says one thing she fears about growing older is that she will have to think about money and she doesn’t want to. I told her I would be her banker. Personally I like to think a lot about cars, what features they offer and what they cost, but my sister will only talk about where they GO. She doesn’t want to know anything else. I’m also better on the computer than she is, but we don’t have one over here yet. Our father sold it when we moved. My sister does not want to know any of the fancy programs, she only wants to know HOW TO TYPE.

  My sister and I don’t fight much, but sometimes she gets mad at me like when we were still in St. Louis and I found this list she made called “Against Growing Up” that included things like “They forget what it felt like to see a rabbit for the first time” and “They are always busy and sticking to schedules.” I stuck it on the refrigerator with a magnet where both our parents read it. They thought she meant them.