Habibi: List 4

“Well, it can’t be very hard,” Liyana answered testily.

At lunch she hiked miles within the walled city, around curls and corners of tiny alleyways, up secretive staircases, along crowded thoroughfares smelling of oranges and rose water and damp, mopped stone.

“Was it in the newspaper?”
“Maybe.” So she spread the back pages from both newspapers on the floor and started scouring them.

All she found were ads for purchasing a “beautifully sculpted charm replica of the Second Holy Temple in Jerusalem” and a concert by the Jerusalem Woodwind Quintet (the Jewish paper) and giant obituaries and restaurant ads (the Arabic paper).

This is his country. It is a very conservative country. Haven’t you noticed?

People have supposedly even been killed! For little indiscretions!

Just before Liyana stepped inside the café by herself, Or materialized beside her. “You made it! You remembered my directions!”

The Israel Museum, largest in the country, displayed archaeological wonders and contemporary art.

He seemed calmly deliberate, paying close attention.

But her mother smoothly turned her attention to Omer, smiling that generic mother smile.

Liyana said, “No one I go to school with is an Arab either. Did you know they made me an honorary Armenian citizen?”

But the holiday decorations weren’t nearly as prominent or glossy as they were in American cities.

He said people always asked him if he was religious or secular.

Poppy knew from when he was a boy there must be a kernel of truth on every avenue.

Any kind of fundamentalism gave Poppy the shivers.

“Fundamentalists talk louder than liberals,” he said. “That's too bad. Maybe we moderate people should raise our voices.”

“Fundamentalists talk louder than liberals,” he said. “That's too bad. Maybe we moderate people should raise our voices.”

On the other side of the earth, Peachy Helen’s parents had believed their Christian denomination was “chosen” too.

Then they talked about wanderers and gypsies and vagabonds longer than they talked about anything else.

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.

He tried to calm Sitti down, but she was inconsolable, whimpering like a cat.

Poppy said dourly, “Is this an appropriate gift for a young man to give a young woman?”

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.

Omer seemed shy when she raved over her lamp.

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.

Omer folded a small origami ball for him from a piece of notebook paper, and batted it across the table.

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.”

She even imagined she carried some essence of Mark Twain inside herself, which was why he appealed to her so much.

After they returned in their newly dazzled state to the cluttered table where Rafik 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?”

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.

She took the book to their table spread with Rafik’s information on famous rivers of the world and shielded it from Rafik to read, “There are wild, hungry kisses or there are rollicking kisses, and there are kisses fluttery and soft as the feathers of cockatoos.”

The author, Diane, talked about her memory of kissing in high school, using a rich string of adverbs—“inventively... extravagantly... delicately... elaborately... furtively when we met in the hallways between classes...”

The author, Diane, talked about her memory of kissing in high school, using a rich string of adverbs—“inventively... extravagantly... delicately... elaborately... furtively when we met in the hallways between classes...”

The author, Diane, talked about her memory of kissing in high school, using a rich string of adverbs—“inventively... extravagantly... delicately... elaborately... furtively when we met in the hallways between classes...”

Poppy said their skins would feel so sticky after plunging into the Dead Sea, they’d have to lie down under freshwater spigots to wash off.

The women were going to hike ten miles through the wilderness to see some hermit nuns who wouldn’t be hermits anymore once they got there.

Poppy and Liyana in the front seat hadn’t even noticed the Bedouin tents perched far from the road in a crevice of shade between two dunes.

A girl with tight braids swayed and bent hypnotically.

They were practically sitting on top of the water, as if invisible lounge chairs buoyed them up.

Khaled said haltingly, “My family—does not like to fight. My parents are very—sad till now. They will never be finished with sadness. I—had a bad picture in my mind—a long time. For myself I never fight. Then my mind is sick and doesn’t get well. Sadness is—better.”