Rafik lay on his bed reading a recently arrived tome of Star Trek wisdom, the Vulcan dictionary. One of his strange extraterrestrial friends in the U.S. had sent it to him. Rafik told Omer, “It took a month for it to arrive surface mail, which means it came on a ship. Liyana says it was obviously not a spaceship.”
Rafik mumbled some gobbledygook to Omer that probably meant “comrade.” Then he stood up, extended his hand normally, and asked in English if Omer would like to play catch until they left.
When Poppy emerged from the bathroom, his skin looked raw. He came toward Omer with his hand out, a little too jauntily, and said, “Let’s hit the road!” Liyana thought he looked at Omer curiously, in a good way. They picked up Khaled and Nadine at the camp. Nadine had a bundle of za’tar breads wrapped in a cloth for Sitti from her mother.
Driving up to the village, Rafik and Nadine, who were smallest in size, huddled on the floor of the back seat, laughing. Liyana was tucked into the center of the seat between Khaled and Omer. Today she didn’t mind at all that they were crowded. She even liked the curves more than usual, when they made her lean in Omer’s direction.
Poppy stopped at three different shops to pick up newspapers, bottled water, tins of apricot juice, a stack of two dozen pita breads, a bulging sack of fresh oranges, some with leaves still attached, and a special kind of white cheese. “Keep going, already!” Liyana’s mother said. “The car is stuffed!”
Liyana thought Poppy was trying to stall.
As their car careened past a concrete Jewish settlement with its enclosures of barbed-wire fencing and military tower, Omer craned his neck to stare out the window and spoke soberly. “I have never before seen this part of the West Bank. I always wanted to see it.”
He stared out at stony orchard terraces and banks of olive trees. Deep pools of shade. Cradled valleys. Flocks of stone-colored sheep. Poppy kept taking full breaths at the wheel, as if he were hyperventilating. Khaled had his face pressed to the window. Omer said, “These lands don’t seem abandoned. The villages look very old. I knew it wasn’t true.”
Poppy said, “Who says they are abandoned?”
Omer said, “People—say.”
Then Poppy asked Omer, “What do your friends think about the West Bank?”
Khaled looked at him. Omer stared and stared out the window. He said, “They feel—scared. They—don’t know. They never came here. They think it is a different world.”
There was a long silence in which Poppy echoed him, whispering, “Different world?” He didn’t sound mad about it.
“I never imagined it—so beautiful over here,” Omer whispered.
Liyana tapped her mother on the shoulder, speaking softly. “Remember? That’s just what we said!”
Rank whispered, “Are we in a spy zone or something? Why is everybody whispering?”
Liyana’s hand brushed Omer’s on the seat. He gave it a little squeeze.
Poppy changed the subject. “Has Liyana ever told you about when I met the actor Omar Sharif?”
Omer said, “Yes, but you could tell me again.” Poppy laughed. He was loosening up.
In the village, the almond trees around Sitti’s house had burst wide open with fragrant white blossoms. They hadn’t been blooming the week before. Everyone breathed deeply and stretched as they stepped out of the car.
Swirls of children appeared around them. They carried blue marbles, rattles in an old tin can. Their faces hoped, did you bring us anything? Gum, candies, what, what, what? The only cow in town, hidden within a neighbor’s courtyard, let out a loud Moooooooo.
Omer said, “Even the cows welcome you?”
“Of course!” Liyana said, and Poppy laughed.
Poppy pulled a handful of clinky loose change from his pocket and dropped it on the ground in front of three boys. “Oh-oh!” he shrugged, teasing them in Arabic. “Take it, take it!”
Rafik produced a pack of Chiclet chewing gum and peeled the wrapper back. He held out the box. Omer startled Liyana by pulling a plastic sack of orange balloons from the backpack he carried.
“What else do you have in there?” she asked.
He tipped his head and looked secretive. “Slowly!” he told her.
Around their heads, in the sweetness of a breeze that already smelled of summer, a dozen children blew up their blazing orange bananas and planets. They huffed and giggled. Some had almost no air in their little lungs at all. Khaled helped them. Sitti stepped from her stone courtyard flapping her hands. She hated it when people stood around outside. She wanted them inside, sitting down. Sometimes the village felt like a kingdom with Sitti as the queen.
They stepped carefully over the crooked threshold of Sitti’s house. Liyana liked watching Omer notice things. When his eyes fell on her own second-grade school picture with two missing front teeth poked into the corner of Sitti’s picture frame, he pointed and made a question mark with his hand. You? She grinned. Balloons were bumping and plummeting against the ceiling as children batted them high.
Dareen, Liyana’s second cousin ten times removed, appeared with a huge bouquet of mint. Omer stuck his face into it as she passed and she laughed. She was shy.
“I like n’an’a,” he said, using the Arabic word for mint, which startled Liyana.
“You know some Arabic?”
He turned his finger in the air. “Language is one tiny shiny key!”
She felt a sudden regret—she didn’t know anything in Hebrew yet. “All I know is shalom.”
“That’s a beginning,” Omer said. Liyana thought how both Hebrew and Arabic came from such a deep, related place in the throat. English felt skinny beside them.
But if she tried to take on one more language, she thought, she might explode—like the almond trees with their billowy blossoms.
Sitti kissed Nadine and Khaled on both cheeks and leaned down to place her hand gently on Khaled’s leg. She said a blessing over it. Then she shook Omer’s hand, putting her face very close to his to stare at him. Moments later, she spilled her high-pitched siren again. Was she that glad to see them? Flapping her fabulous tongue way back in her mouth, she wailed and trilled.
Liyana said, “I couldn’t make that sound for a hundred sheckels,” and Omer clapped his hands. “I saw it in an Arab movie once! It’s like the tongue is trying to fly!”
Liyana, Rafik, and their three friends decided to hike around the village. They walked slowly because Khaled was still limping, passing the post office and climbing among the cemetery with its unmarked graves. Poppy’s father’s bones lay somewhere in there. Maybe he was dust. They walked among the lentil fields to a mysterious mounded shrine encircled by large smooth stones. They all stooped and looked. Prayer rugs were rolled against one wall. A circle of half-burned candles in blackened glasses filled a corner. Nadine and Rafik crawled inside. Khaled sat on a stone to rest.
Liyana plucked the feathered head from a weed. “Omer, how old were you when your father died?”
“Five.”
“How did he die?”
“A car accident.”
“Do you remember him?”
“He’s—cloudy in my mind.” He paused. Then he spoke again, staring at Khaled. “My father did not think Arabs and Jews could ever get together again. My mother says that, too, when she reads the news. She’s pretty upset today. That I came here. My father thought our break was—really broken.”
Khaled looked off across the valley. “It’s a bad story.”
Liyana said, “That’s why we need to write a better one.”
Far away, a single donkey brayed. The note resounded through the valley.
Omer ran his hand through his hair and continued, “Sometimes I try to think of my father’s eyes still in the world, looking. What did he see? He needed to see more!”
Khaled said, “We all need to see more.”
They were quiet, suspended in yellow light that falls onto hills when no one is watching.
Then Rafik broke the spell, galloping down
the road toward the spring where he and Omer scooped cold water straight into their palms. They splashed their own faces. They splashed each other’s faces. Liyana walked behind more slowly with Khaled and Nadine. They seemed a little sad. Khaled said, “We wish our family lived up here.”
Later everyone washed their hands and sat on floor cushions in the big family circle as platters of steaming food traveled around. They scooped mounds of rice and cauliflower onto plates and Omer asked questions through Poppy. He wanted to know people’s jobs, how they were connected. Poppy said, “Don’t get started! They’re all connected!”
Liyana whispered to Poppy, “Who do they think he is?”
Poppy whispered back, “Who knows? Maybe they think he’s our next-door neighbor from St. Louis, since he’s only speaking English. I just said he was our friend.”
Omer, Khaled, and Nadine ate so much that everyone was complimented. The aunts always teased Liyana’s family about living on “crumbs of bread and mint leaves.” No one seemed suspicious of Omer, as Poppy had said they might. In fact, they seemed flattered that any mystery person would want to spend time with them. When you sat around with people, regular people with teacups and nutcrackers, they just wanted to get to know you.
Sitti threw her head back to gulp a soda straight from the bottle. A scraggly cat leapt through the doorway onto the ledge above Sitti’s bed. She waved it away, muttering and mumbling.
“What’s she saying?”
“I won’t even begin to tell you.” Poppy sighed.
Khaled said, “She told him he is not invited and he can go cook his own dinner with the other cats on the roof.”
They ate and ate and ate. The whole day tasted wonderful. Afterward, when matches were struck for the awful after-dinner cigarettes and steam rose in small clouds from coffee cups, Omer said something directly to Sitti in slow, broken Arabic, which made the whole room go quiet. Now they knew he wasn’t from St. Louis. A little hush rolled around the room.
Sitti replied in a voice more booming and animated than usual. It made Poppy sit straight up. Liyana tugged at him. “What is she saying?”
Everyone in the room pinned their eyes to her face. Except for Abu Daoud, who stormed from the room looking angry, after blurting something sharp to Omer. “What happened?” Liyana pulled Poppy’s sleeve.
Poppy spoke haltingly. He didn’t like translating if the person who had spoken could understand him. But sometimes he had to. Omer had said how much it meant to be with them. He thanked them for their welcome and said they felt like family to him. He wished they didn’t have all these troubles in their shared country. Sitti said, “We have been waiting for you a very long time.” But Abu Daoud, who now realized Omer’s identity, hissed, “Remember us when you join your army.”
Later Liyana would try to remember exactly what the room looked like during the next few moments. Maybe the light changed. Maybe the sunbeams falling across Sitti’s bed intensified, and the small golden coffee pot glittered on its tray. The day turned a corner right then, but you would have to have been paying close attention to see it.
Sitti plunged into a new story, her voice dipping and swooping energetically, hands fluttering around her face. Omer stared at her with complete attention. Poppy frowned as she spoke.
“She’s saying,” Poppy translated hesitantly, as if the story tasted slightly bad in his mouth, “that your friend here reminds her very much—of someone she used to know. Someone—she liked a lot. Nobody knew it, though. He played a little flute—called a nai—that used to be more popular over here. This was—forty, fifty years ago? He was a shepherd and—he slept in a cave. Shepherds do that. Or, they used to.”
“Cool!” Rafik said.
“And she was—married for a long time already. So she kept her feeling for him—hidden. For years. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this! Maybe she shouldn’t be telling me! Hmmmmm. She says—he ‘saved her heart.’”
Poppy put his hand to his forehead and pinched it, massaging the skin the way he sometimes did when he was trying to work out a problem. But Sitti kept talking. Khaled and Nadine looked mesmerized. Liyana’s cousins’ mouths hung wide open. Aunt Saba let a cigarette burn down to a stump between her fingers and flicked it into the air when it stung her.
Poppy cleared his throat loudly and continued translating. “The shepherd—had a healing power, she says. For air! He could make the air feel calm again when it felt troubled. You know—after something bad happens—it’s like a bad note hangs in the air? Hmmm—She says he could fix it. He would walk up a road—playing his flute. His flute—fixed it. I wish he were still here!”
Liyana’s mother said, “Where is he now?”
Poppy held up one hand. “Wait a minute, she’s going on and on. She says—your friend—has her friend’s—same kind of hair. He has—his exact same shape of head. He has—something in the way he turns his eyes to things.”
Now Sitti opened both her hands to Omer and said, “Khallas.” Finished. The story was done—for the moment. She also said “Shookran,” thanking him, and smiling widely.
Omer leaned forward to take both her hands in his and thanked her back, in Arabic. The room stayed entirely quiet. Sitti laughed her gutsy, throaty laugh.
Poppy said, “She thinks your friend is—the angel—of her friend, who was killed in the ’67 war. He wasn’t fighting either. He was standing in front of a fruit shop in Nablus.”
“You mean—she thinks Omer is his reincarnation?”
Poppy didn’t know the word in Arabic, but he tried. She shook her head. “No, she says, the angel. I can’t explain. She thinks one person can carry the spirit of another person in—an angel kind of way. Omer, you’ve got a load on your back you didn’t even know about!”
Omer spoke softly. “I’m happy to carry him.”
Omer and Liyana slipped away for another walk before sunset without Rank or anyone else. Liyana felt sneaky, but relieved to have a few moments alone. If Sitti could be a renegade, then she could, too. They climbed the highest hill above the village to the abandoned stone house where her uncle used to live. He had been a recluse and almost never came down.
The path rose at a steep angle. Omer offered Liyana his hand more than once. When they were out of sight of the village, he no longer let hers go.
Weeds had grown up tall around the house’s pale sunbaked stones. A cool breeze drifted through her uncle’s open windows. He had died five years ago.
“What did he eat?” Omer asked.
“What he grew in his fields. They say he was very thin.”
Inside the vacant house, they took deep breaths.
Liyana said, “My grandmother is full of surprises.”
Omer said, ‘Oh Liyana. I’m glad your grandmother isn’t mad that I came.”
“Hardly!”
Liyana’s throat flickered. She gulped and stared at him hard.
Omer said, “Do you think I kissed other people before? Well, I didn’t. It’s a big surprise to me. I don’t want you to get in any trouble,” he said. He kissed her hand.
She laughed. “Maybe a little trouble. I can’t see any way around it.” She leaned forward and kissed him one time on the mouth, then they both looked out the window into the valley, side by side.
Liyana did not think her uncle’s spirit was angry with them for being on his hill. Distant plowed fields seemed to steam and breathe. She felt a great peacefulness floating in the air.
Poppy was standing outside looking up into the night sky when they appeared in the dark. He shook his finger at Liyana. But she knew sometimes he just pretended to be mad because he thought he ought to be. “Where have you been?”
“On the hermit tour.”
Rafik and Nadine were collecting the popped bodies of balloons from the ground and handing them to Sitti, who stretched out the elastic skins and let them spring back to flatness. She groaned and looked entranced. Then she poked them into her belt.
Omer took both Sitti’s hands in his
again when they said good-bye. She peered deeply into his eyes and said, “Be careful! Come back! Please come back!”
Omer said, “Thank you, thank you, I am so happy to know you.”
Liyana didn’t even need translations.
On the drive home, Liyana felt exhausted in a good, full way. Rafik had hurt his knee on a rock and kept moaning in the back seat. Khaled said, “Now you’re like me.” The two of them were eating a handful of pumpkin seeds, pitching the shells out the open window into the blackness. Some of them flew back in and hit Liyana on the forehead. Normally she would complain. But this night she didn’t care. She just brushed them away and leaned in Omer’s direction.
Poppy said, “Today was quite an experience. Nineteen people asked me if they could borrow money.”
Liyana’s mother said she’d had the best day ever in the village and had finally learned how to make lebne by straining yogurt through cheesecloth. She thanked Khaled, Nadine, and Omer for their kindness to the children. “I don’t think they will forget those balloons for a very long time.” Poppy said he would drop Khaled and Nadine at the camp and drive Omer home since it was too late to catch a bus. Liyana could come along for the ride if she wanted to.
The roads were deserted at this hour. A skinny moon lay tipped on its back.
MAP
The calendar has a wide-open face.
Liyana lit one short candle in a blue glass cup and set it on the rug in front of her in her bedroom. Then she sat cross-legged before it. Everyone in her family had gone to sleep.
Flipping open an old notebook she’d written in just before she left St. Louis, she read, It is hard to find anyone else who will admit they do not want to grow up. My friends say they’re ready. Claire says it sounds great to her. Mom says she felt relieved to get older, even though she loved Peachy. Finally she was under “her own jurisdiction.” That makes it sound like a court case. Poppy liked growing up because it meant he could travel “beyond the horizon.” That makes it sound like “Over the Rainbow.” Why does everything sound like something else?
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