“Didn’t the churches wonder where you went when you disappeared?” Omer asked.
“I guess we seemed like hoboes.”
“What’s a hobo?”
Then they talked about wanderers and gypsies and vagabonds longer than they talked about anything else.
Liyana’s parents would discuss religion late into the night in the living room when Liyana was in bed. She would listen to them till their words blended into a soft sheet of sleep gently spreading over her.
Their words made sense. Why would any God want to be only large enough to fit inside a certain group of hearts? God was a Big God. Once Liyana answered someone that way, but it didn’t work very well.
“What religion are you?”
“Big God.”
It sounded like the Big Sam Shop, where truck drivers bought new tires.
Some people let their countries become their religions and that didn’t work either. Liyana thought it would never happen to her. She never even felt like a Full and Total American, except maybe when her kindergarten class said the Pledge of Allegiance with hands on their hearts and she was proud to know the fat fruits of words between her lips—republic, nation, indivisible—what a pleasure just to say words that felt bigger than you were.
Liyana knew indivisible even when her friends still thought it was invisible, but she didn’t tell them because there are things you have to find out for yourself.
WATER AND ASHES
When we were born we were blank pieces of paper; nothing had been written yet.
On Rafik and Liyana’s birthdays, Poppy always brought flowers to their mother. He wanted to thank her for having had such wonderful kids. The day before Liyana’s fifteenth birthday, he stepped through the door after work with a hefty bouquet of white roses, saying, “What do you think? Fifteen deserves something—regal!”
Their mother was still at the English radio station where she worked three days a week now. Rafik liked to say, “Our mother is a DJ,” but the station was mostly news, interviews, and cooking programs. Liyana dug under the sink for a glass jar to put the roses in.
The phone rang and Rafik answered it. He called to his dad, “Quick! I know it’s Sitti, but I don’t know what she’s saying! She’s shouting loud! I think she’s crying too.” Liyana froze.
Poppy let the roses dangle upside down as he listened. Liyana rescued them, her blood buzzing. Usually Abu Daoud conveyed Sitti’s messages, or she yelled into the phone from a distance. She didn’t like to hold the receiver because she thought it might shock her.
Poppy asked a few questions, then was silent a long time. Finally he slammed down the phone. He’d just told Sitti they’d be there right away. “What, what?” Rank and Liyana asked him at once.
“I’ll tell you in the car.”
He was out the door already.
Driving too fast to the village, Poppy said Israeli soldiers had appeared at Sitti’s house and demanded to see her grandson Mahmud, who’d been living in Jordan for the past two years. He was studying to be a pharmacist. Poppy had told Liyana she would like him because he had a good sense of humor, but she hadn’t had a chance to meet him yet.
Sitti told the soldiers, “He’s not home,” because that was the way she talked about him—as if he might turn the corner any moment. “He’s not home, but he might be coming soon.” She could have said that about anybody, even her dead husband, the way she thought of things.
Poppy said the soldiers pushed past her into the house and searched it, dumping out drawers, ripping comforters from the cupboards. Sitti said, “He’s not in there.” They broke the little blue plate she loved. “What are you doing?” she screamed. There were four of them.
Then they went into Sitti’s bathroom and smashed the bathtub with hard metal clubs they were carrying.
Rafik said, “Smashed the bathtub? Why?” Liyana felt nervous wondering, were those soldiers still around? What if they got into a—tango—with them?
Poppy said, “They smashed the sink so it cracked into big pieces on the floor and water streamed from the broken faucets into the room and Sitti was terrified. She thought she was going to drown. She thought water would fill up the whole house, but of course it must have poured into the courtyard and Abu Daoud heard her screams from next door and came running over. He turned off the water at the pipe, I think. Anyway, she said it’s not gushing now. Then the soldiers smashed the toilet—”
Rafik interrupted. “WHY?”
Poppy swerved to avoid a sheep in the road. His voice sounded tight and hard. “THERE IS NO WHY. I am filling up to my throat from these stories. Do you know how many of them I hear every day from my patients at work? I don’t tell you. I can’t tell you. And I thought things were getting better over here.”
Liyana said quietly, “I thought there was always a why.”
Shadows stretched across the road, late afternoon, a softness falling down from the sky no matter what people did.
At Sitti’s house, a small crowd of men and women had gathered tensely outside. They nodded at Poppy and his children as they passed. Rafik entered first and shouted, “Sitti’s house is a mess!”
Sitti was mopping and crying all at once. Liyana tried to take the mop from her hand and she brushed her away. An old lady Liyana didn’t recognize was down on her knees scrubbing the floor with pieces of rags.
Everyone kept muttering about the soldiers. Poppy translated. The soldiers left in a truck. We hate their truck. We thought they weren’t supposed to bother us anymore. We thought the peace said they would stay away.
What did they want? They wanted Mahmud. WHY? For two hours Poppy talked to everybody. Nobody knew. Mahmud read books. Books could be dangerous? Poppy tried to phone the police in Ramallah, but the phone line was blank. The soldiers had cut it. Poppy put his hands to his head. He shook his head, saying, “They must do it because it’s personal. It’s insulting. And it’s weird.”
He tried to calm Sitti down, but she was inconsolable, whimpering like a cat. Liyana thought she was sadder about the blue plate than the toilet. Sitti kept fingering its pieces, trying to fit them together.
Rafik and Liyana sat in the corner, invisible as the lemons in the bowl on the second shelf. Bathrooms were not cheap. Sitti was not rich.
She reluctantly agreed to spend the night at Aunt Saba’s house, folding a dress to wear the next day and her prayer rug and a towel. She mumbled something under her breath.
They walked with her through a stunned village. Even the scrappy birds seemed quieter. Even the children who usually called out from rooftops weren’t making any sound.
In Ramallah, Poppy stopped at a store open late for plumbing parts, so he could engage a plumber to head to Sitti’s house the next day. At home, their mother was frantic. She met them at the top of the steps. “No note? Do you realize what time it is?”
After Rafik told what had happened, she was silent. Then she shouted, “NO! That poor little bathroom! But why? Why the bathroom?”
Liyana quoted, “There is no why.” It was strange how quickly someone else’s words could come out of your mouth. Idly lifting the front section of the newspaper, she read that a Jewish deputy mayor of Jerusalem proposed two thousand Arab homes in east Jerusalem be torn down to make room for fifty thousand houses for Jews. It didn’t say anything about pain or attachment or sorrow or honor.
Liyana slipped outside with the front page and the box of kitchen matches.
On a bare patch of earth, Liyana lit two edges of newspaper. They caught slowly at first, then burst into a cone of bright flame. The fire ate the words. Fire ate them inside and out. Liyana blew the ashes into the dust.
Later Sitti would tell them her new bathtub swallowed water with the sound of a cow.
FIFTEEN
Before anything was written, where was I?
That night Liyana dreamed a cake fell off its plate into the sea and floated away from her. She reached wildly with both her arms, standing kneedeep in the pull of powerf
ul waves.
And it was Omer she was calling to. “Save it! Can you reach it?” but he was swimming too far out. Then she was shouting and waving, “I’m sorry! I wanted to share it with you!” but he could not hear her. He was swimming the other direction. And the cake was drowning.
When Liyana woke on her birthday, her mother was singing in the hallway. Poppy joined in off-key as he stepped into the bathroom and Rank pretended to be playing a trombone. “Pancakes for breakfast!”
Liyana’s place at the breakfast table was surrounded by cheerful hand-drawn cards with yellow Magic Marker daisies. “A decade and a half!” Rafik had written. “Is that an antique yet?”
Poppy wrote half his card in English and half in Arabic. “To my soon-to-be-bilingual daughter,” the English said. Liyana could make out letters in Arabic by now—ones that looked like chimneys or fluted edges, but she couldn’t really make out words yet. So he helped her read it. “I’m proud of you. What a year it’s been!”
Mom’s just said, “To my queen—at 15” in calligraphy. She was already stirring up batter for a pineapple upside-down cake, Liyana’s favorite. “I had a weird dream about a cake,” Liyana said.
When Poppy went downstairs to get his gift for Liyana out of the trunk of the car (fifteen new notebooks, including some fancy European ones, and fifteen new pens), he found a mysterious silver package sitting on the step. He carried it upstairs held far out from his body, saying, “Isn’t it sad what one thinks about these days? Should we get a bomb-sniffing dog? In the old days people never thought about such things.”
Since it had Liyana’s name handwritten and spelled correctly on a card at the top, she opened it and gasped.
Inside was the green lamp she’d first asked Omer about, at the Sandrounis’ ceramics shop, the one too expensive to buy for herself.
A tightly folded note was taped to it. “Don’t worry, I traded labor, not cash. Happy birthday! Omer.”
Liyana wondered how he got to her house so early to deliver it. He must have taken a taxi from Jerusalem, dropped it off, and ridden the same taxi back.
Poppy said dourly, “Is this an appropriate gift for a young man to give a young woman?”
Her mother said, “It’s fine! It’s not jewelry or clothing. It’s not silver or gold. Don’t give her any trouble!”
All day at school, when Liyana described the scene of Sitti’s bathroom smashing, the chips of ceramic and waterlogged rooms, her classmates shrugged. People got used to disasters. No one was even killed.
Liyana felt distracted during class. She always had mixed feelings on her birthdays. She gazed out the school window at the changing clouds, casting a flurry of words toward Omer’s side of the city. I miss you. I want to see you. You would never do something like those soldiers did. But she wrote only five words down in her new notebook: I love your amazing memory.
HISTORY OF KISSING
I would like to know the story of every little thing.
Rafik and Liyana dressed one of the sleeping chickens in the henhouse in a brocade tunic Liyana had sewn especially for her, from a wide silver and burgundy scrap her friend Bilal had given her. They imagined what it would be like for Imm Janan, their landlord’s sleepy wife, to discover her hen wearing a lavish robe, as if she’d been crowned queen at midnight.
Liyana had had a hard time sewing the thing so the hen’s legs could poke out where they needed to. She even “fitted her” once, in the dark. Rafik wanted Liyana to sew a bonnet as well, but she thought that might be a little much.
The hen mumbled cozily in their hands. Liyana said, “I hope this won’t give her bad dreams or anything.” Once the robe was tied on and the hen’s legs came through the bottom, she rippled her body back and forth, as if to see how much she could still move. Did she think it was a new suit of feathers?
They photographed her with their mother’s flash camera, which seemed to upset her more than the dress did.
Rafik said, “I don’t think she likes having her wings pressed down.” But she settled back into her nest and closed her eyes.
The next morning they were anxious to get to the American Library, where they often went on Saturdays to do their hideous homework. Afterward they’d meet Poppy for lunch and have minty ice cream at the YMCA next door. At breakfast, Rank kept glancing out the window toward the henhouse. He said, “Drive us, Poppy, let’s go now!” What if Imm Janan saw the chicken and screamed instead of laughed? They wanted to be gone when she discovered it.
At their gleaming library table, Liyana felt distracted. She kept getting up to pull reference books off the shelves and flip through their pages. She found some really old ones about Palestine with intricate drawings of the Old City in them. In a 1926 book called Life in Palestine When Jesus Lived, she read, “… the people were constantly at work… How many languages were spoken, what differences of color, look, habit, manner, dress, must have been seen!”
On her birthday after school, she had called Omer to thank him for the wonderful surprise, and his mother, who didn’t speak English very well, answered the phone. Liyana had to ask for him three times.
Omer seemed shy when she raved over her lamp. He just said, “Read some good books under it, okay?” and asked what she had been doing lately. They hadn’t been able to share their lunch breaks for a few weeks since he’d been practicing for a debate tournament with his team at lunchtime. Liyana had mentioned more than once that she and Rafik would be studying at the American Library in Jerusalem on Saturday. Now she kept hoping secretly Omer would show up.
So when the heavy green library door squeaked open again, after admitting nuns and the Italian man who ran the matches factory and his daughters and six blond tourists with turquoise backpacks, and Omer finally stepped through, wearing a checkered yellow shirt and looking quizzical, Liyana rose joyously to greet him and they hugged tightly for the first time. She pressed her face against his shoulder. It smelled like sun.
Liyana introduced Omer to Rafik, who said only, “Is it true you play soccer?”
Omer folded a small origami ball for him from a piece of notebook paper, and batted it across the table. “I made the ball so you make the goal,” he whispered.
They tackled their respective heaps of homework, whispering, laughing, and joking till the librarian stood over their table, saying, “You will please keep your silence or I will be forced to ask you to leave.” Then it was harder than ever not to laugh.
Liyana was writing about Mark Twain, since he too had lived in Missouri, her old state, and no one else in her class had chosen an American for their author’s report. Everyone else was doing someone like Shakespeare, Dante, or John Milton. When she went to search for the library’s tattered copy of Huckleberry Finn on the far shelves of “Fiction”—to compare the older edition with her own—Omer walked to the end of the same aisle to study the giant Map of the World on the wall, copying some town names from Russia in his notebook. “We have to write about the places our ancestors came from,” he said. She had not known his grandparents were from Russia till now.
Liyana kept thinking how everybody was a little like everybody else and nobody was the same. She thought of those snowflake and fingerprint stories about the perfect uniqueness of each one and wondered, “Are we supposed to feel good about that?” She wanted one snowflake to resemble another one now and then. She even imagined she carried some essence of Mark Twain inside herself, which was why he appealed to her so much. Twain didn’t like the Middle East, though. She wouldn’t quote anything he’d said on his dopey travels through the Middle East.
Somehow she couldn’t bear to return to their table while Omer still stood at the end of the aisle. She felt suspended, reading spines of other books, held fast by his presence close by. She whispered chillywilly under her breath. He turned, then, and caught her staring at his back. He came over beside her and whispered, “What are you thinking about?”
Her throat felt thick with a wish to say, simply, “You” but she said, �
��Mark Twain.”
He touched her elbow gently, leaned forward, and placed his beautiful mouth on hers.
A kiss. Wild river. Sudden over stones. As startling as the first time, but nicer, since it happened in the light.
And bigger than the whole deep ache of blue.
It didn’t go away right away.
It held, as Omer gently held her elbow cupped in his hand. Warmth spilled between them.
“Liyana,” he said. “I—like you.”
“Oh!” She said, “Me too. I like you.”
He said, “You are not—mad?”
“No!”
He smiled, “I don’t think the books—are mad.” He kissed her again, on her right cheek only, delicately as a feather’s touch, and the librarian pushed a cart past their aisle, not even glancing in their direction.
After they returned in their newly dazzled state to the cluttered table where Rank was drawing an elaborate soccer field on four pieces of notebook paper laid out end to end, Omer leaned over him and said, “I have bad news, new friend. I have to go to my own soccer game—right now. Would you like to come with me?”
Rafik couldn’t, because he and Liyana were meeting Poppy at the Philadelphia for a late lunch at two. But Liyana could tell he was pleased.
Liyana and Omer traded a long gaze as he left. They grinned easily. She placed one finger on her vivid lips. Rafik didn’t notice.
Then she walked over to “Reference” and slid an encyclopedia off a shelf to see if “Kissing” had an entry, but nothing appeared between Kishinev, the capital of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic of the USSR, and Kissinger, Henry, born in Germany and a naturalized American like her father. Well, she thought, sort of like her father. Her father didn’t care for him. There was no “kissing” in the encyclopedia. She wondered, “Where did kissing come from? Who started it?”
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