Liyana’s mind flew forward at full speed. She realized there shouldn’t be anything shocking about his being Jewish in a place made up mostly of Arabs and Jews. It’s just that she hadn’t even thought of it. And wasn’t his name “Ornar” an Arabic name?
When she mentioned this, stuttering, he laughed roundly so his fabulous teeth showed. “Omer, my friend,” he said, “with an e not an a—which is a Jewish name. You don’t like it as much?”
She thought, It’s stupid for my heart to race.
“Could we sit down a minute?” she asked. They sat on a wall beside a cedar tree and she took a deep breath.
“Did you know I wasn’t Jewish?” she asked him.
“Of course.”
“How?”
“Well, you were carrying Arabic copybooks in your satchel, for one thing. Those little gray notebooks for homework? And you told me you live on the Ramallah road, didn’t you? I don’t have any other friends who live on the Ramallah road.”
“Does that bother you?” she asked.
“Ha! Would I suggest we get together—if it bothered me? The question is—does it bother you?”
“Of course not,” she said, startled, as words came out of her mouth that she could not predict from minute to minute. “I’m an American,” she said. “Mostly.” But that sounded ridiculous. He hadn’t asked for her passport. “I mean, this fighting is senseless, don’t you think? People should be able to get over their differences by this time, but they just stay mad. They have their old reasons or they find new ones. I mean, I understand it mostly from the Arab side because my father’s family lost their house and their money in the bank and lots of their community when my father was a boy and the Palestinians were suffering so much, just kicked around till recently as if they were second-class human beings you know they couldn’t even show their own flag or have hardly any normal human rights like the Jews did till recently and it’s getting better only slowly you know my relatives have to get permits for things all the time and it wasn’t that way when my father was little, things were more equal then and of course I know the Jewish people suffered so much themselves, but don’t you think it should have made them more sensitive to the sufferings of others, too?”
Her mouth had become a fountain. Spurting waterfalls of words.
He stared at her quietly. “I do.”
Birds jabbered in branches above them. Flit and bustle. What did people seem like to birds?
Omer took a deep breath and stood up. “It’s a bad history without a doubt,” he said. “Nothing to be proud of.” He closed his eyes, turning his face to the side, right into the sun. “So what are we going to do about it?” Then he opened his eyes, made a little bow, and put his hand out toward the avenue, as if to offer her the street.
Liyana thought, Now he’ll hate me. I’m a talking maniac. As a kind of finishing touch, Liyana blurted, “I have hope for the peace, do you?” And he stared at her closely. “Of course I do. Would you still like to go to the museum?”
They walked up the street without speaking, their arms brushing a few times. Liyana thought, My mother’s probably watching us from the window of the bank across the street, her mouth wide open with shock that I’m not where I said I would be.
Inside the massive museum, Liyana and Omer stared happily at giant paintings, sculptures, and ancient lamps dug out of caves. They made themselves pay polite attention to the older art, though they both agreed they were more interested in the odd contemporary rooms.
Liyana liked how Omer stood back from pieces, then moved in to examine them closely, and drifted back again. She still felt breathless from her outburst. He seemed calmly deliberate, paying close attention. He shook his head over a painting that was nothing but bright red slashes, quick thick lines. He said, “My eyes don’t like it. Do yours?” Liyana wondered why it was such a relief to dislike the same things your friends did. What did that tell you about a person?
“Do you mind,” she asked, “if I call you by your whole name instead of your nickname?”
He said, “I don’t mind if you give me a new name I never heard before.”
Omer was wearing a thick, white, long-sleeved T-shirt with three buttons at the throat, blue jeans, and purple high-topped tennis shoes. She liked his clothes. She could easily have stared at him more than the artwork, but tried to keep her gaze on the walls whenever she was in his vision. Her eyes rose into a turquoise horizon. She floated on the ripe blue cloud an artist had painted crowning a yellow city. Was that Jerusalem? Sometimes Omer stood behind her and she heard his breathing as they viewed the same piece. She felt a delicious jitter inside.
One artist offered a giant bright installation titled “Underground Springs” made from tin cans roped together, painted flashing purple and silver, spilling forth from a map of Israel on the wall. Omer laughed out loud. “Do you worry about it?” he asked. “Where all the trash will be ten years from now? I worry about it every time I open a can of tuna fish.”
“Tuna fish?” Liyana said. It was one of the things her mother had been looking for in their Arab stores, but Arabs didn’t like tuna much. “Can you get it over here?”
“Of course. It’s delicious with yogurt.” He poked her in the side. Other foods the Abbouds missed crowded her mind. Should she ask? Lima beans! Lemon meringue pie!
When she finally remembered to glance at her watch, she exclaimed so loudly, a dozing guard over in the corner jumped. “Oh my! I forgot to meet my mother! I’m ten minutes late already!”
She and Omer sprinted toward the windmill, where they found her mother tapping her foot and staring at her watch, arms crammed with packages. When she saw them (about twenty-five minutes late by now) she said to Liyana, “I thought maybe you’d gone onto daylight savings time.”
“Mom, I’m so sorry! The time—slipped away from us. We ended up going to the museum instead, I hope that’s okay with you, you would have loved it!—you know that big one I’ve been wanting to go to? Anyway, this is Omer, my friend I mentioned.”
Her mother greeted Omer with interest, but couldn’t shake his hand since hers were loaded. Omer reached out and insisted on carrying almost all her bags to their car. Liyana could see she was impressed by his manners.
“I found it!” her mother said over her shoulder to Liyana. “Mayonnaise!” Omer raised his eyebrows. Liyana felt trembly and weak. She hoped her mother wouldn’t say other goofy family stuff. But her mother smoothly turned her attention to Omer, smiling that generic mother smile.
“Have you always lived in Jerusalem? Do you like your school? Are you familiar with Liyana’s school? Do you know other people who go there? What do you most like to do in your spare time?”
He said, “Wander. Both inside and outside my head.” Her mother looked at Liyana as if she could now see how the two of them were connected.
In the car on the way home, her mother said calmly, “Liyana, I don’t think he is an Arab.”
Liyana said, “So?” which was not the way to answer your mother when you wanted to keep her on your side. But that’s what came out.
They drove in silence for a mile, past the Universal Laundry and Abdul Rahman’s shoe repair shop where Liyana’s favorite beat-up American loafers were currently taking a vacation, awaiting new soles. Liyana said, “No one I go to school with is an Arab either. Did you know they made me an honorary Armenian citizen?”
Her mother looked sideways at her. “You know what I mean.”
Liyana swallowed twice. “We already talked about it. He believes in the peace as much as we do.”
A crowd of old women with baskets on their arms waited for a bus. Her mother paused a long time before saying, “I just fear your father’s response. Of all the boys you might find in this town to have a crush on …”
Liyana kept plummeting. “Can he come over? For dinner someday soon? He gave me his telephone number and I gave him ours!”
“Don’t you start calling him, Missy,” her mother said, and Liyana op
ened and closed her mouth like a fish. If she didn’t, she might suffocate.
At dinner, Poppy said starkly, “What? Who? Where?”
Liyana said, “This isn’t a book report, you know.” Then she said, “Remember when you told us how you had Jewish neighbors and friends when you were growing up here? Remember how we had plenty of Jewish friends back in the United States? Why not? He lives on Rashba Street. Did you ever go to Rashba Street when you were little?”
Poppy said, “Sure.” But a moment later he said, “Never, never, never.”
All evening Liyana stood by her window staring west toward Jewish Israel. She had a new feeling about it. The guard at the museum quietly locked the galleries. The paintings slept calmly on their walls. Over there the Mediterranean’s soft blue waves were scattering shells. Liyana had never yet been to a beach in this country. She thought she’d like to visit one with Omer. They could take their shoes and watches off and walk and walk for miles. They could sink their feet into the sand.
WE WISH YOU A MERRY EVERYTHING
Would a wise man please step forward?
At Christmas time, Jerusalem and Bethlehem felt crisp and cool, flickering with candles in windows, buttery yellow streetlights, and music floating from shops—thin threads of light and sound. But the holiday decorations weren’t nearly as prominent or glossy as they were in American cities. “I don’t think Santa Claus made it over here yet,” mourned Rafik.
“Sometimes,” Liyana mused, “when you’re standing in the places where important things really happened, it’s even harder to imagine them. Don’t you think? Because video stores and Christmas pilgrims unfolding Walking Tour maps are getting in your way. History is hiding.”
“Thank you,” said Rafik. “Thank you for your wisdoms.”
At midnight on Christmas Eve they stood with their parents in the long line at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Poppy had done this as a teenager himself, with his Arab Christian friends. Liyana and Rafik both had checkered black and white kaffiyehs wrapped around their necks against the chill. Irish nuns harmonized in wavery soprano voices. Liyana and her mother led a few verses of “Angels We Have Heard On High.” A gold star on the floor inside marked the spot where the manger might have been. It was the one “official” spot that didn’t make Mom feel like crying.
Liyana liked to remind herself: Jesus had a real body. Jesus had baby’s breath.
And Jesus did not write the list of rules posted on the stone wall. There were many, but Liyana’s eyes caught on the first: NO ARMS ALLOWED INSIDE THIS CHURCH.
A KERNEL OF TRUTH ON EVERY AVENUE
She really believed her parents when they said, “Look both ways.”
On one of the first warm days, Omer and Liyana licked pistachio ice cream cones as they sat on an iron bench near the Russian Orthodox Church with its onion domes. They were waiting for Hagop and Atom from Liyana’s class to appear so they could go see a French movie at the British library.
Omer asked, “What religion are you?”
The Abbouds had never belonged to a church since Liyana was born, but it might have made things easier. Liyana’s mother said they were a spiritual family, they just weren’t a traditionally religious one.
Most people said, “Huh?”
They wanted you to say, “I’m this kind of letter and I go in this kind of envelope.”
Omer knew exactly what she was talking about the minute she started to describe it. He said people always asked him if he was religious or secular. He would say, “I have Jewish hands, Jewish bones, Jewish stories, and a Jewish soul. But I’m not officially observant of—the religious practices of the Jewish people. Got it?” His family did a few special-holiday things.
Liyana’s family believed in God and goodness and hope and positive thinking and praying. They believed in the Golden Rule—Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—who didn’t? A mosquito didn’t.
Liyana’s mother believed a whole lot in karma, the Hindu belief that what someone does in this world will come back to him or her—maybe not the day after tomorrow, but eventually. Liyana also liked the eightfold path in Buddhism, and the idea of the bodhisattva, the soul who does good for others without any thought for himself or herself. She hoped she would get to know some in her life, besides her parents. Rafik believed in sandalwood incense.
Liyana’s entire family believed in reincarnation because it made sense to them. They didn’t want to have to say good-bye for good so soon. Poppy said he’d like a thousand lives. Rafik wanted to be reborn in Japan so he could ride the bullet train.
“But what about all these new people?” Omer asked her. “Where did they come from? You know, the population explosion?”
“I don’t know. Maybe souls can split or something.” Liyana wasn’t too interested in the details.
She just liked thinking of different lives as chain links, connected. She had always felt homesick for some other life, even when she was a baby standing in her crib wearing a diaper not knowing any words yet.
Liyana’s parents did not believe everyone was an automatic sinner when they were born. Too dramatic! All people on earth would do good and bad things both. Poppy said every religion contained some shining ideas and plenty of foolishness, too.
“The worst foolish thing is when a religion wants you to say it’s the only right one. Or the best one. That’s when I pack my bags and start rolling.”
He was always rolling, Poppy Abboud. Out of one good story into another one. He didn’t like fancy church buildings either. “What else could they have done with their money? They could have helped the poor people, for one thing!”
Once in the United States some ladies came knocking at the Abbouds’ door when Poppy was home alone. “We’d like to tell you about Jesus Christ,” they announced, and he thought to himself, “I was born in Jerusalem, right down the road from Bethlehem, and they think they’re just now telling me?”
But he said, “Come in, come in.” Excusing himself for a moment, he marched into his bedroom, tied on a long gray cloak that had belonged to his father, and a checkered kaffiyeh, the headdress that he never really wore, and leapt out of the bedroom into their startled gaze.
“But first,” he said, “may I tell you about Muhammad?”
They left the house that instant and never returned.
The Abbouds did not believe in the devil, except the devilish spirit inside people doing bad things. They did not believe in hell, or anybody being “chosen” over anybody else—which Liyana had to ask Omer about. He looked sober. He told her the Jewish idea of being “chosen” meant more than he could explain. “Maybe Jews are also chosen to suffer. Or to be better examples.”
Liyana said, “It seems like big trouble any way you look at it. I’m sorry, but I don’t like it. Do you believe you’re chosen? It sounds like the teacher’s pet.”
He didn’t know what that was. “It’s not a question of believing,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
Omer said, “It’s more like—history. A historical way of—looking at ourselves—and things.”
Liyana felt gloomy. “And it’s history that gave us all these problems,” she said. “I think as long as anybody feels chosen, the problems will get worse,”
Omer asked, “But what about your father’s family in the village? Don’t they try to make you become Muslim like they are?”
“No. Not yet, anyway.”
Omer said, “I’d like to meet them. Do you think I could—go with you someday?”
“I hope so!” Liyana said.
Poppy knew from when he was a boy there must be a kernel of truth on every avenue. He thought about the reasons behind different beliefs—no pork, for example, came from the old days when pork was the first meat to spoil. “Does it make sense,” Poppy said, “that any God would choose some people and leave the others out? If only Christians or Jews are right, what about most of Asia and the Middle East? All these millions of people are just—
extras? Ridiculous! God’s bigger than that!”
Any kind of fundamentalism gave Poppy the shivers. The Jews in Hebron called themselves “holy pioneers.” “Fundamentalists talk louder than liberals,” he said. “That’s too bad. Maybe we moderate people should raise our voices.”
When Liyana told this to Omer, he said, “Your father’s right. Please, I want to meet him!”
On the other side of the earth, Peachy Helen’s parents had believed their Christian denomination was “chosen” too. They were the only ones going to be “saved”—but Peachy refused to raise her own children that way.
Peachy Helen had often taken Liyana’s mother to the art museum instead of to church. They would stare into blue and green paintings by Monet. “Look at the wavery edges of things! That’s how we could live.”
When Liyana’s mother had measles as a girl, she lay in bed for a week in a dim room with lowered shades. She lay as still as a cucumber on a vine.
“Peachy Helen stood over me saying prayers of healing that she made up as she went along. She said, I hope they’ll work if they’re not official. First she cried, then we both laughed together. I promised her I would get well. And of course I did. But it was then I realized I had been grumpy sometimes for no reason. After that, I thought of every day as A FRESH CHOICE!” She talked about it in capital letters as if it were a feature at the grocery store. “My mother sang a song to keep me calm, “Look for the Silver Lining.” The same one I taught to you.”
Mrs. Abboud had told Rafik and Liyana to carry the song as a crucial part of their memory banks. Liyana had a stomachache when they learned it so she kept picturing the inside of her stomach coated with silver. They made Peachy Helen pay a nickel to hear them sing it. Sometimes Liyana thought of that song as their religion.
When Liyana and Rafik were little, their mother took them to the art museum and to a rich assortment of Sunday schools—Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Unity, and Unitarian—where they signed in as “visitors,” wore the yellow visitor ribbons, and sometimes kept coming back for months. They just didn’t join anything. Poppy stayed home reading the newspaper or digging in the garden.
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