With her luck she had been born into the only nonkissing culture, just when it started feeling like a valuable activity.
“I cannot speak for Greeks and Jews and Armenians. I used to trade desserts with them, but I cannot speak for them regarding kissing. Somehow I do not think they are as strict about kissing as the Arabs are. Probably to their benefit. Of course anyone can kiss once they are married.”
Poppy looked suddenly alarmed. “Is there someone you want to kiss?”
“Oh sure, I just arrived nine days ago and I’ve already staked him out.”
“Liyana, you must be patient. Cultural differences aren’t learned or understood immediately. Most importantly, you must abide by the guidelines where you are living. This is common sense. It will protect you. You know that phrase you always hated—When in Rome, do as the Romans do? You must remember, you are not in the United States”
As if he had to remind her.
When she went to bed that night, she pressed her face into the puffy cotton pillow. It smelled very different from the pillows in their St. Louis house, which smelled more like fresh air, like a good loose breeze. This pillow smelled like long lonely years full of bleach.
The next day Liyana’s family rented the whole upstairs apartment of a large white stone house out in the countryside, halfway between Jerusalem and the town of Ramallah. A bus stopped right in front. Surrounded by stony fields, the house had a good flat roof they’d be able to read their books on, if they spread out blankets. Poppy pointed out the old refugee camp down the smaller road behind the house—it had been one of the first ones from 1948. From the roof it looked like a colorful village of small buildings crowded close together. “Believe me,” Poppy said, “it looks better from a distance. Camps are difficult places.” Beyond it sat the abandoned Jerusalem airport—a few streaks of gray runway and a small cower. “It’s fast asleep,” Poppy said sadly.
Each wide-open empty bedroom in the house had a whole wall of built-in wooden cupboards and closets and a private sunporch. Finally they’d be able to unpack.
Their new landlord, Abu Janan, which meant the Father of Janan, looked like the Prophet of Gloom, with a huge stomach too big for his pants. He told them they probably wouldn’t be able to get a telephone hookup for at least a year, since he just got his after requesting it forever.
Poppy said, “Well, I’ll work on it immediately since I’m a doctor and require one. Also” (he winked at Liyana), “don’t teenagers need to have telephones?” As if she had anyone to call.
“Where is Janan?” she asked.
“Who?” Poppy said.
“The person this man is the father of.”
“In Chicago. Grown up.”
Too bad. She’d thought she might have a built-in friend.
From the immaculate bare kitchen of their new flat, Rafik and Liyana could hear squawking rising from the backyard. They went downstairs and stepped outside to find a pen of plump black chickens pecking heartily in straw. A short cottage held their laying nests.
“We’re living at a manger after all,” Rafik whispered. “You want to sneak down sometimes and give them treats?”
“What is a treat to a chicken?”
“Cantaloupe seeds and the middles of squash.”
“How do you know?”
Rank shrugged. “I have many secrets. We could let them out someday!” The yard was surrounded by a wall so they wouldn’t be able to go far.
Liyana felt a pleasant mischief lay its cool hand on her head again.
Rafik said, “Did you see that landlord of ours? He could use some exercise! If he chases them, he’ll get some!”
Liyana mused. “Shouldn’t we wait at least a week? Let’s establish ourselves as law-abiding lodgers first.”
“Then?”
A bus kicked up dust on the road after letting off a crowd of passengers. Their new neighbors who didn’t yet know they existed.
“Then we have fun.”
INTERIOR DECORATORS
My father once said he’d like to paint every board of our house a different color.
Rafik tacked up bright travel posters from Poppy’s travel-agency friend on the freshly painted white walls of his room. He posted “New York” and “Portugal,” though he’d never been there, and “The Doors of Jerusalem” and “TEXAS USA,” the place he hoped to go someday.
Liyana said, “Did you get any for me?” Rafik said she could have “Lufthansa” but she didn’t want it. She’d never even flown on that airline.
In St. Louis, Liyana’s room had been painted a deep, delicious color called “Raisin.” Her walls looked like an art gallery arranged with block prints and dreamy watercolors by her friends. She had a bulletin board with silly pictures taken at people’s birthday parties and dried flowers and pages ripped from magazines that were too nice to throw away. The gleaming, golden eyes of a cat stared right at her in bed. She had a framed pastel portrait her mother had sketched of her when she was two and fell asleep on the blue rug in the living room. Liyana loved it very much and would have brought it to Jerusalem, but she worried the glass in the frame might break. She didn’t bring Peachy’s needlepoint alphabet or her personal portrait of Peter Pan, either.
Liyana thought she’d try living with blank walls for a month or two.
It was just an experiment.
JERUSALEM ABOVE MY HIGHEST JOY
The city was a cake made of layers of time.
“I’m not going,” Liyana told Poppy.
They were talking about Sitti’s invitation to come out to the village so she could “teach her things” on weekends.
“Why doesn’t she want to teach Rafik things, too?”
“Because she’s a woman and she knows womanly things.”
“She can keep them.”
Poppy sighed, “Fifty years from now you will deeply regret this moment.” He turned and stalked down the hallway toward his own bedroom. That’s what he always said. Fifty years from now I’m going to be very busy, Liyana thought.
A few days before, Poppy had actually thumbed through a Bible looking for a quote he liked from the Psalms: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning. May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.”
It made Liyana mad when he read it to her. Was there an underlying meaning? Was he saying she wasn’t acting happy enough to be here? She wasn’t in the mood to go shopping day after day to replenish their household supplies. She didn’t even act excited about their new white Toyota, which smelled like fresh carpet and roses inside. “We could drive to Damascus or Aleppo!” Poppy said, standing back proudly to admire his purchase. “Well, we might have trouble getting across the border….”
Mostly they would just be driving back and forth from Jerusalem to Ramallah to their house, which sat so neatly in between.
Every morning at breakfast, when Poppy greeted Rank and Liyana with his characteristic, “Good morning! And how are you today?” she felt like answering in a gloomier way. I’m fair. I’m floundering. I’m lonesome. Liyana begged Poppy to pass by their new post office box often to see if she had received any letters from home. What was wrong with Claire? She imagined Poppy watched her from the corner of his eye.
The Abbouds spent an entire exhausting weekend sightseeing nonstop around Jerusalem morning till night. Poppy wanted them to “get the lay of the land.”
He led them up winding alleyways and down ancient stairs to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher he’d been telling them about for years. The priests here were famous for arguing to get the best altars for their own services. Poppy had done his homework on the wall outside the door when he was a boy and once saw two priests have a fistfight, rolling in the dust.
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 G
ethsemane, 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.
THE PRINCIPAL WEARS A HAT POINTING TO THE MOON
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.”
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