“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?”
VERY VERY DISTANT RELATIVES
“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?”
Rafik lit a stick of incense and wandered back and forth in the hall as if conducting a ritual. When Poppy finally appeared, he sat with the woman and they talked a long time. She kept gesturing with her hands, but she didn’t look upset.
In the kitchen Liyana washed spinach. Rafik had recently started cutting up onions, which their mother said was a great help to her. “That really irritates me,” Liyana muttered, “that he does one little thing and you act so grateful. I do things every day!”
Poppy stepped in, shaking his head. “The woman’s a mystery,” he said. “I think she’s a cousin of a cousin of a cousin who died before I was born and no one ever remembered to tell me about him. She lives in that little village on the lip of the mountain before you get to Nablus. I’ve hardly spent any time there, so I don’t know any of the people she keeps mentioning.”
“What does she want?”
“She wants me to buy her a dress.”
“What?”
“It’s an old custom. When someone returns from America, they buy every woman relative a bolt of cloth, for making a new dress. I guess it’s to signify the success the traveler has had in America.”
Liyana thought about the ten thousand relatives she’d met already.
“Everyone? Buy everyone dresses? Wouldn’t that be impossible?”
“Of course. Especially if you had to buy them for people you’d never heard of before.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to drive her as far as Ramallah, where the fabric store is, and—I’ll think of something. She can take the bus to her village from there.”
They were breathing the rich scent of grilled onions and keeping dinner warm in the oven by the time he returned. “Well?” they all spoke at once.
He grinned. “I took her to the fabric store, all right. I told her to go ahead and get out. She thought I was going to park the car and come back and pick out a huge piece of red velvet for her. But instead I drove around the block and came straight home.”
Rafik said, “You dumped her?”
Poppy shrugged. “The old customs have to be changed somehow, you know? Little by little. I told her I thought it was a stupid custom while we were still sitting here—but she was relentless. So—as easily as she appeared in our house, I disappeared. She’ll get over it.”
“Won’t she be mad at you?”
“Have I ever seen her before? Do I live my life being scared of the anger of people I don’t even know? I am related to Hassan who is related to Hani who is related to Naimeh who is related to Fatwa who is related to this glass of water who is related to the river Jordan who is related to John the Baptist—come on!”
REMEMBER ME
I’m the snip of red thread caught on a twig.
Maybe the hardest thing about moving overseas was being in a place where no one but your own family had any memory of you. It was like putting yourself back together with little pieces.
At home in St. Louis even the man at the grocery store remembered the day a very young Liyana poked a ripe peach too hard and her finger went inside it. She shrieked and the neighborhood ladies buying vegetables laughed. Forever after when she came into his store, the grocer would say, “Be careful with my plums! Don’t get too close to my melons!”
It was a little thing, of course, but it helped her be somebody.
In Jerusalem she was just a blur going by in the streets. The half-American with the Arab eyes in the navy blue Armenian school uniform. Who?
PAST AND PRESENT ROLLED INTO ONE
Water came from the earth and stories sprang from the stones.
Sitti kept Liyana’s bed in the village ready, the pillow puffed. She pointed it out each time the Abbouds arrived for their regular weekend visit, but Liyana turned her face away. Why was it such a big deal? Sitti stroked her face saying, “Ya Habibi, Habibti,” cackling like a giddy munchkin.
But one Saturday morning, Liyana felt ready, as if a compass had swung round inside her and held. “I’ll stay at the village,” she said. She told Poppy and her mother that they could return on Sunday night and pick her up.
They’d be there all Saturday afternoon themselves, as usual, which relieved Liyana. If Poppy were with her, he could explain—who was who, what was what. It was all a guessing game without him.
Liyana put her backpack in Sitti’s corner. She had brought a collection of poems in case she had time to read, and her writing notebook, and her small troll with rhinestone eyes. Sitti might like it. She could already tell Sitti got excited over very little things.
Rafik had disappeared with Muhammad again. Aunt Amal arrived to take Liyana’s mother out to the orchards and show her the almonds and olives ripening on the branches. They carried baskets for picking herbs—oregano and mint, sumac and thyme.
Sitti motioned Liyana and Poppy toward the mounded oven called the taboon, large enough to step into, beside her house. She showed Liyana how to slap bread dough into flat rounds and fling them onto a hot black stone to cook. When her long dress flapped dangerously close to the flames, Liyana stooped to pull it back, but Poppy said, “She knows what she’s doing.” Their other relatives had modern electric bread ovens now, but Sitti refused to touch them. She remained devoted to the old ways of doing things.
She pitched Liyana another ball of dough, inviting her to try it. Liyana copied her motions, kneading, slapping, and swinging the dough high in the air as she’d seen pizza makers do in Italian restaurants back home. Sitti’s loaves were perfectly round, but Liyana’s bread looked like Australia. Sitti helped her shape and reroll.
But it turned out she didn’t need him so badly after all. Sitti lifted a tall clay jug onto her head and motioned Liyana to hike with her down the dirt road. They charged off into the breeze. Sitti kept glancing at Liyana’s face as if to check on her. Was she happy? Did she like this? Sitti waved her arm at the expansive view across the valleys and hills. She blew a kiss to the air, which helped Liyana take a deeper breath herself. Liyana could skip if she wanted to. She could twirl in a circle with her arms out to feel dizzy.
No one watched them or acted formal. Liyana felt as invisible and happy as she used to feel coasting on her bike.
They passed the telephone operator’s house and he waved at them through the open door. He had a switchboard in front of him with wires and holes, just like the switchboards in old American movies. They passed a few lone houses sitting off by themselves under gnarled trees. They passed a cemetery and Sitti turned her face away. Liyana noticed there were no words on any of the white gravestones.
Then they came to the spring, where water gathered in a shining pool by the roadside. Sitti filled her hand and let Liyana drink from it. She’d never drunk from anybody else’s hand before. The water tasted crisp. Then Sitti filled the jug slowly from a pipe jutting out of a ledge. Poppy had said the women still preferred this fresh “earth water” to the water that came from faucets. Sitti placed a thick cloth pad on her head and heaved the full jug back up there, to carry back to the house. Once the jug was in place, she balanced it without using her hands. She motioned to Liyana. Did Liyana want to try carrying it? Liyana jumped back. She couldn’t even carry a peach on her head!
After delivering the water home and snapping green beans into a big pot to steam with a cinnamon stick, Sitti took Liyana to meet a neighbor who was stringing orange beads on nylon thread. The woman opened a cupboard to show Liyana dozens of lovely necklaces hanging on nails. She urged her to choose one. Liyana didn’t wear necklaces herself, but selected a turquoise one strung with antique Palestinian coins. She could hide the necklace till her mother’s birthday. The woman kept song sparrows in small wicker cages and gave Liyana two fat olive oil soaps to take home to her mother, too. She hugged Liyana good-bye.
Later Liyana realized how many things they had all communicated without trading any words. Toward evening, when Rafik had returned sweaty from playing with his cousins in the fields and their mother had returned sunburned, happily stocked with a year’s worth of herbs and some miniature embroideries to practice on, and Poppy had awakened from his second nap, they sat together on floor cushions by Sitti’s bed cracking almonds into a wooden bowl. Liyana leaned against Sitti’s shoulder so she could reach the bowl.
Sitti kept Poppy busy translating. She related her dreams as if they were news reports, staring into Liyana’s face as Poppy spoke. “The other night I dreamed that a relative named Salim who died long ago came and asked me to accompany him to Mecca. I was so afraid. I want to go to Mecca, but not with somebody dead. I thought he would take me with him to the next world and make me die.”
But then?
“When I woke up I saw that ugly cat sitting in my window, so I knew I was still alive.”
Sitti popped two almonds into Rafik’s mouth when he laughed and then she left the room to arrange the green beans and stuffed squash they were having for dinner on big trays.
Poppy leaned toward his family and said, “You’ll notice Sitti’s stories don’t always hang together. She has no logical sense of cause and effect. Anyway, in this part of the world, the past and present are often rolled into one.”
All the uncles were away at another village that day for a big meeting about land problems. The aunts had gone to Bethlehem to help a distant cousin prepare for her wedding. Liyana liked having fewer people around.
Poppy said he was afraid to buy Sitti a bus ticket for the pilgrimage to Mecca, because he really did think she might die soon afterward.
Why?
Sitti was back in the room by now, listening to them talk English and nodding her head. She said the squash would be cool enough to eat as soon as two birds crossed in the sky. Poppy didn’t even blink. He just kept talking.
“Sometimes when a person looks forward to something for such a long time, it keeps them alive. Then when they accomplish it—boom.” He studied such subjects. He said the old people he’d been seeing in the hospital here were incredibly “durable” for their advanced ages. “Lots of them are waiting for a true, independent Palestine, too. They’re not going to give up when they’re this close.”
Sitti collected the almond shells in her skirt and went outside.
Liyana kept considering what Poppy said about hopes being accomplished.
“Like you coming back to Jerusalem, Poppy?” “I hope not.”
At the last minute Liyana begged Rafik to spend the night in the village with her. He wouldn’t care that he didn’t have a toothbrush or change of clothes. “Listen,” she hissed, “if I’m going to be out here pretending I understand what’s going on, at least you could be with me.” He agreed. He was really having fun here. The boys didn’t do as many chores as the girls did, which irritated Liyana again. She felt like ordering them to go chop wood or mulch the trees.
Their parents left them after the big delicious dinner and two rounds of hot tea with mint and sugar. Sitti said she could read their fortunes in the tea leaves in the sugary bottoms of their cups. The tea leaves had their own alphabets and conveyed messages once the tea was gone.
Liyana felt so tired and chilly she wished she could curl up like a mouse in a hole. The minute the sun went down, the temperature in the stone rooms plummeted.
Rafik and Liyana looked hard at one another as the sound of their parents’ car disappeared down the mountain. They were sleeping in the same room with Sitti, who took many minutes to unroll her gigantic pouchy belt, which doubled as a pocket. She emptied it of coins, a few crumpled money bills, a giant key, some loose buttons, and a pink comb, lining her treasures on a table. She wore her white pajamas under her clothes so she wasn’t shy at all to slip her dress off right in front of them. Liyana took her own pajamas into the bathroom to change.
They slept on three skinny beds in a row, like in a dormitory. Sometimes Aunt Saba or Aunt Lena slept here, too. Sitti’s bed had a big dent in the metal headboard. Poppy had asked her about it and she said the Israeli soldiers did it one day when they were in a bad mood.
Sitti muttered to herself after the lights were out.
“What is she saying?” Rafik whispered.
“You think I know?”
“Do you think she’s praying?”
“No. It sounds more like a conversation.”
“With who?”
“Did you know she believes in angels and dreams?”
Long silence.
He was fading, his voice slower.
“I hope—she doesn’t dream—we’re monsters.”
MAD
What good is a mouth if it won’t open when you need it to?
Sometimes people carried anger around for years, in a secret box inside their bodies, and it grew tighter like a hardening knot. The problem with it getting tighter and smaller was that the people did, too, hiding it. Liyana had seen this happen, even in elementary school. Somebody wasn’t fair to someone, and the hurt person just held it in. By the end of the year they had nearly disappeared.
But other people responded differently. They let their anger grow so large it ate them up—even their voices and laughter. And still they couldn’t get rid of it. They forgot where it had come from. They tried to shake the anger loose, but no one liked them by now.
Liyana wondered if the person w
ho could let it out, the same size it was to begin with, was luckiest.
In Jerusalem so much old anger floated around, echoed from fading graffiti, seeped out of cracks. Sometimes it bumped into new anger in the streets. The air felt stacked with weeping and raging and praying to God by all the different names.
One afternoon, Liyana walked over to Bassam’s spice shop to buy coriander for her mother. She needed a purpose to start feeling at home. So she’d actually begged her mother for an errand. Bassam smiled to see Liyana again.
His shop was a flurry of good smells—jars, barrels, small mountains of spicy scent. Bassam weighed whatever you wanted on an antique scale that looked as if it came straight from the Bible. He put weights on one side of the scale and a large spoonful of coriander on the other. Then he poured it through a paper cone into a brown bag and folded the top over twice. He said, “So how are you doing over here? Are you finding your way?”
He gave her some fresh cardamom seeds still in their pods as a present.
She pointed at his elephant-god poster. “I read about Ganesha,” she said.
He brightened and said, “He’s my friend!”
They were talking about the Armenian sector and the best music stations on the radio when a Jewish man in a yarmulke walking by the shop addressed Liyana loudly in Hebrew.
Of course she didn’t understand him. She didn’t even realize he was talking to her. But Bassam motioned to her to turn.
“What?” she said, and the man switched over to English.
“Why you bother with this animal?” he said, pointing to Bassam. “Be careful. Don’t trust animals. Go to better stores in our part of town,” so she knew he thought she was Jewish.
He probably didn’t care that Bassam spoke very good English.
Liyana’s legs started shaking. Her mouth opened wide and puffed out nothing. She felt feverish. She could have fainted on the ground.
The man said one more thing. “Be smart.” Then he turned and walked away. Satisfied.
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