Habibi

by Naomi Shihab Nye

  Liyana would open Peachy’s dresser drawers, pulling out a silver bracelet engraved with tipis and canoes, and dusty powder puffs, trying to jar her memory.

  Usually she’d end up having to talk to Frank, their neighbor in blue overalls who specialized in car engines and organic farming methods. He didn’t remember much about childhood, or he wouldn’t tell. But Sitti remembered everything. She even remembered when a Turkish tribe rode south past Jerusalem and the children were told to lie down in ditches so they wouldn’t be run over by horses.

  The problem was Liyana could only have a deep conversation with Sitti if Poppy were present. In Arabic class at school, Liyana was just learning the colors—fidda for silver, urjawaani for purple.

  Anyway, Sitti loved when Poppy was present. She rubbed the back of his hand till he looked uncomfortable. He had been her last of eight children, born when she was past the usual childbearing age.

  One Saturday in the village, with a light rain falling softly outside, Liyana tested her cassette tape and plopped down on a floor mattress beside Sitti, who was cracking almonds again by her fire in the oil stove. Liyana slipped off her blue Birkenstocks. Sitti picked one up, turned it over, looked at its sole upside down and said in Arabic, “It’s too fat.”

  Tell me a story.

  “About what?” Sitti laughed. She offered Liyana an apricot. The whole world was a story. Stories were the only things that tied us to the ground!

  Because she knew Sitti liked the subject, Liyana asked for “a story about angels.” Poppy looked dubious even as he translated. He thought angel talk was foolishness.

  Sitti stared at Liyana’s cassette recorder as if it were an animal that might bite her with its tiny teeth. A thread of faraway music floated past and vanished.

  Sitti placed both hands over her own eyes, as if casting a spell on herself, and began speaking. “Your grandfather, my husband, who died so long ago already, used to come home with his pockets full of a plump kind of dates, not those thin, dried-up ones that make you thirsty even in your sleep. He would present them to me as if they were coins or golden bracelets. He knew I loved them very much. We would place them in a white bowl covered with a cloth in the cabinet and we would eat them one at a time and I am not ashamed to say we did not tell the children they were there. Because one hundred little children from everywhere were always passing through this house. And there would not have been enough of them to go around, you know? But also, we wanted them ourselves!” Sitti laughed her throaty laugh.

  “So one day I was taking a nap as your grandfather traveled up to Galilee and an angel appeared in my dream and said she would give me some important advice, because she was an angel. ‘How can I be sure of that?’ I asked her. I can’t believe I was so rude to an angel!

  “She said, I will soon appear to your husband, who is carrying luscious dates in his pockets and I will ask him to share them with me and he will not be able to say no. Check with him when he comes back. That will prove it. Now here’s the advice—and she gave it to me. So the minute he returned I said, ‘Did you get dates?’ and he looked sorrowful.

  “’Yes,’ he said, ‘but as I was standing in the souk—the marketplace—a young girl with strange eyes came up to me and said, Please sir, I beg you for the food you are carrying in your cloak, and as she seemed to have some extra power to see through cloth, since the dates were not visible, I felt obliged to hand them over. Then I couldn’t find any more to buy before I came home.’”

  Liyana asked, “What was her advice?”

  “What? Oh. Not to buy the cow. Someone was selling a cow just then. We never have many cows around here, you know. There’s only one right now, down the road in Hossaini’s courtyard. Most people like goat’s milk better. But I always liked cow’s milk better so I wanted your grandfather to buy a cow that was for sale in the next village. He didn’t want to. He didn’t like cow’s milk. Also, cows need more to eat than goats. And he didn’t want it tied up in our courtyard at night taking up all the room.

  So we didn’t buy it. Good thing! Because we heard it died only a few weeks later. So the angel saved us from trouble! And all we lost was—a few dates.”

  Sitti cleared her throat and smiled. She stared at Liyana meaningfully. Poppy was finishing his translation. He still looked dubious.

  Leaning over to Liyana, Sitti stroked her hair, the way you’d pet a cat or dog. “Always listen to the angels who find you,” she said. She placed two fingers in the center of Liyana’s forehead and closed her eyes.

  So Liyana closed hers, too.

  Maybe this was a charm.

  When Liyana’s aunt had to go to the hospital because her legs swelled up, Sitti said they swelled “because she has such a big and heavy head.”

  When Poppy told her that had nothing to do with it, she said, “What do you know? Your head is normal sized.”

  If a bird pooped on a clean white sheet while flying over the clothesline, that meant bad luck. But if it pooped on your head, that meant your first child would be a boy.

  Sitti wouldn’t wear socks because cold feet would help her live longer. She thought Liyana should stop wearing socks, but Liyana couldn’t stand it.

  Sitti perceived messages everywhere. You will soon go on a long journey to a place hotter than this place. Beware of a bucket.

  Liyana liked this stuff. She made a whole new notebook for it.

  Poppy said he became a doctor because he grew up with such superstitious people. “They drove me crazy,” he told Liyana in private. “I had to balance them out.”

  “Do you believe in heaven?” Liyana asked Sitti on the day of their interview, and she answered quickly, “Of course. It’s full of fresh fruit.” They took a short break to slice three Jericho oranges in half and share them. Sitti closed her eyes when she swallowed. Then she bustled around the room, muttering, sweeping the windowsill with her short-handled broom, straightening the bags of rice and flour and sugar on her shelves. She pulled a few strands of long hair out of her pink comb.

  “What’s she saying now?” Liyana asked.

  Poppy said, “I think she’s reciting the bees passage from the Koran.”

  Liyana sang out, “Ho!” to get her attention again.

  Sitti jumped. “Sit down!” Liyana begged her. “Please! Min-fad-lick co’dy hone!” It was one of the first phrases she’d learned.

  Liyana asked Sitti to tell more about her dreams at night and she said, with a mournful expression, “I dream of all the hard times I had in this life. And how mean the Jewish soldiers act to us. They don’t even know who we are! And I dream of the way I felt when my most beautiful and beloved son,” she paused dramatically, staring at Poppy, “went so far away from me I couldn’t even see the tip of his shadow.”

  Liyana’s father liked this conversation less and less.

  Sitti ordered Poppy to give money to the poor before she died and more money to the grave digger and the women who washed her body. She insisted the people who buried her should leave lots of space in her grave so she could sit up to talk to the angels. She didn’t like to talk to anyone lying down.

  Liyana laughed out loud, but Poppy stood up, rubbed his hands together over the fire, and said, “Let’s do something else.”

  RAFIK’S ESSAY ON KHALED AND NADINE

  We have some new friends who live at the refugee camp down the little road behind our house. They have a bicycle and we do not and sometimes they let us ride theirs. The tire is rubbing the fender. Poppy says we can get a bicycle soon. Liyana says she hopes we can get two. They caught our chicken when it flew away. It is not really ours but we act like it is. Khaled thinks we live in a very big house because their house has only two rooms. When we visit them, Nadine, his sister, makes us drink this red juice made from pomegranates which makes my mouth go into shock.

  Sometimes they come over and watch Abu Janan’s television with us. They don’t have a television and we don’t either. Abu Janan says it makes him happy when people fill up his
rooms. Liyana likes ancient reruns of “I Love Lucy.” She says Desi Arnaz and his cute accent remind her of Poppy. I like “Tarzan,” who reminds me of Liyana. I wish Abujanan had a Super Channel so we could pick up “Star Trek,” my favorite American show. Liyana has no interest in “Star Trek” at all. She hates the jumpsuits the characters wear and says their faces have seams. Also she says she has never seen anything green on that show, like a blade of grass or a tree. So she is glad there is no Super Channel and when I told her I would save up my change from my lunches so I could pay for the channel, she said she would steal my money and donate it to the refugee camp.

  Khaled and Nadine like anything at all. They have lived in the refugee camp all their lives. They like whatever we watch. They roll their Rs when they speak English and we told them they do not have to do that. I’m sure they could tell us a lot of things, too.

  Rafik Abboud

  DONKEY BY THE ROAD

  Emily Dickinson never had to move across the sea.

  After a nurse appeared at St. Tarkmanchatz without warning and plunged a clumsy cholera injection into the arm of each student, Liyana stayed home from school for days with a raging fever. “I think she gave me cholera,” Liyana mumbled, after falling asleep with a thermometer in her mouth. Her mother bathed her face with cool water and set up a water pitcher beside her. Her father gave her some medicine he worried wouldn’t help much. They both said, “Rest, rest, rest.”

  From her bed, she could hear her family continuing their lives without her. Clinking. Opening doors. Rafik running water in the bathroom.

  She was—incidental—to the planet’s actions.

  For one day she lay dreaming of the part in Jackson’s hair. When she had told him she was leaving the country, a week after their kiss at the movies, he looked as blank as an ironing board.

  Someone dropped a book down the hall. Someone banged a locker door. Why did she remember those sounds?

  He put on a cowboy voice and said, “Well—see ya later—pardner.”

  That is what he did.

  The second day she lifted her hand to flip open a book of poems by Emily Dickinson, trying an experiment. Each time Liyana read a Dickinson line she really liked, she’d close her eyes and make up a line of her own inside her head. I’m not copying, she thought. I’m being infused. It’s like drinking water straight from Sitti’s spring.

  When she read, I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—As if my Brain had split—her own head answered, A Canyon opened—where before there had been smooth land. Now where do I stand?

  The third day Liyana was sick, she watched the sun crawl through her room as the hours progressed. It does this every day when I’m not here to watch it, she thought. Light rays crept across the windowsill, touching the legs of the table, and her schoolbooks toppled like monuments beside the tangled sheets of her bed—she’d kicked the blankets to the floor because she was SO HOT.

  Long fingers of sun inched across her mattress. When she thought, this is the same sun that strokes the faces of my old friends back in my earlier world, her eyes felt thick. What was Claire doing at this moment? Claire’s recent letter told about the school spelling bee that Liyana had won the year before, a new singer that everybody liked, crushes and anticrushes. It also said, “Are you all right?” because the bad news of Jerusalem made it across the ocean more quickly than good news ever could. If Liyana answered at this moment, she would have to say, “No.”

  Sitti appeared that afternoon with a flushed face, looking upset. She kept repeating something so Liyana’s mother called Poppy at the hospital to translate. Poppy had spoken with Sitti that morning by telephone and mentioned Liyana was home sick. Sitti was furious he hadn’t alerted her right away. Was he trying to insult her? Didn’t he know she could make Liyana well?

  Sitti closed the door of Liyana’s room and smoothed the white sheets out on the bed, muttering the whole time. Sitti made Liyana lie very still with her arms stretched out alongside. Plucking a handful of silver straight pins from her plump cloth belt, she stuck them one by one, standing up, into the sheets around Liyana’s body. Liyana kept cracking her eyes open to peek at what Sitti did. She mumbled the whole time she worked. More and more pins appeared. There must have been hundreds! Soon the pins outlined Liyana’s body like a metallic running fence.

  Then Sitti said a series of prayers. She leaned over Liyana with a rocking motion, back and forth, rubbing her own hands together over Liyana’s body and opening them wide. She flicked her fingers, as if she were casting the illness aside. Liyana felt spellbound. A cool current seemed to shoot through the pins around her. Were they breaking the circuit of the fever or what? She couldn’t even tell how long all this went on. Twenty minutes? An hour?

  Rafik returned from school and stepped into Liyana’s room to say hello to Sitti. “Wow!” he said. “It’s a voodoo bed!” Khaled and Nadine were downstairs sending Get Well greetings.

  Then Liyana began sweating profusely. Sitti acted happy now. She took towels, wiping Liyana’s face and arms and legs very hard. Liyana called to her mother, “I’m starving!” It was the first appetite she’d had in days. Her mother brought her slices of fruit and toast and soup.

  All through dinner, Rafik reported to his sister later, Sitti chastised Poppy for not having let her heal Liyana earlier. She shook her finger and frowned, telling him he should have been smarter, especially since he was a doctor and all. She slept on the couch, and left early the next day, on the first bus back to the village.

  The fourth day Liyana felt well enough to eat three bowls of tapioca pudding. She could have written to Jackson to say, “Guess what? I forgot your last name.”

  Instead she stood by the front window staring down on streams of cars passing by. A yellow license plate meant Jews and blue meant Arabs. When you stayed home for days in a row, it seemed strange to remember all the places you would have been going otherwise.

  Liyana could see the old man, Abu Hamra, pushing his cart of lettuces and cabbages up to the crossroads where he sat with it. Abu Hamra didn’t like you to peel back the outer layer of a cabbage to peek inside. The first time Liyana visited his stand with her mother, she idly tried to see inside a tight cabbage’s head, but Abu Hamra snapped at her so loudly, she dropped it.

  Poppy said Abu Hamra’s family had their well closed in by Israeli soldiers a few years ago after his nephew was suspected of throwing stones at an Israeli tank. That could make you mad for a long time, Poppy said. Losing your water because of a rumor.

  Beyond the lettuce cart, a donkey sprawled by the road on his side, head down, as if he were sick, too. Where had he come from? Had a car hit him in the night? No one stopped, or paid him any attention.

  Liyana slowly pulled on her oldest, palest blue jeans. She hadn’t been dressed in four days. She never knew blue jeans were so heavy. Her mother stood in the kitchen chopping vegetables for soup. The house smelled healthy, of celery and carrot broth. Her mother looked surprised to see Liyana up and about.

  “Are you well?”

  “Not quite, but I’m going down to see the donkey by the road. I think he’s hurt or sick.”

  Her mother shook her head. “The fever must have affected your brain. No ma’am. Get back in bed, dearie.”

  For some reason Liyana started crying.

  “He needs me,” she moaned. Then, more logically, “What if he needs me?” She begged her mother to let her carry him a pan of water.

  Mom examined her with a tipped eye. Then she dried her hands thoroughly on her apron. “I’ll go with you,” she said. “Put a sweater on, too. It’s windy out.”

  They filled the bottom of the steamer pan with water and took along a saucer and spoon.

  The donkey’s velvety eyes were closed. He breathed heavily and seemed to like their gentle stroking. His muscles relaxed. A man in a car slowed down and called out to them in Arabic. Liyana shook her head.

  “I think he said the donkey’s dead, but he’s wrong,” she told her mother.
<
br />   “Is your Arabic really that good already?”

  “No, but I have a better imagination in Arabic now.”

  The donkey opened one glossy eye to look at them, but stayed down.

  They spoke soothingly to him, spooning water onto his dry tongue. He licked it slowly around inside his mouth and swallowed. “Sweet donkey, take it easy, have a little sip.”

  Liyana’s favorite Christmas song had always been “The Friendly Beasts.” In one verse a donkey speaks: I, said the donkey, shaggy and brown, I carried His mother up hill and down, I carried her safely to Bethlehem town, I, said the donkey, shaggy and brown.

  Liyana asked her mother, “Do they have a humane society here?” Her mother didn’t know. While they discussed it, the donkey opened both eyes together for the first time, stared at them, heaved his deepest breath yet, and died. He was suddenly, absolutely gone. They didn’t see any soul rise out of his mouth or nose, though they were looking hard.

  For the second time in an hour, Liyana cried. Even her mother was wiping her eyes. Where had he come from? She would ask Khaled and Nadine if someone was missing a donkey from the refugee camp. Liyana wanted to bring a sheet out from the house to cover him, but they only owned the sheets for their beds and one set extra. Her mother put a soft hand on Liyana’s shoulder.

  “Let’s go on home,” she said. “We did what we could. And we were with him when he left us.”

  In the night his body disappeared. Maybe someone with a truck carried him away. Liyana felt bad that nobody stayed with him till that happened.

  The fifth and last day that Liyana was at home recovering, she thought about donkeyness all day. She tried to sketch a donkey in her notebook. Her drawing was hopeless. Some people say a donkey is a “humble” beast—unlike a proud Arabian horse, for example. She thought about the word “humble” because Poppy had told her it was something she needed to work on.