Free Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye Page A

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 sameroom 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.”

M
AD
    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 who 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 andraging 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