Free Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye Page B

elephant-god poster. “I read about Ganesha,” she said.
    He brightened and said, “He’s my friend!”
    They were talking about the Armenian sector and the best music stations on the radio when a Jewish man in a
yarmulke
walking by the shop addressed Liyana loudly in Hebrew.
    Of course she didn’t understand him. Shedidn’t even realize he was talking to her. But Bassam motioned to her to turn.
    “What?” she said, and the man switched over to English.
    “Why you bother with this animal?” he said, pointing to Bassam. “Be careful. Don’t trust animals. Go to better stores in our part of town,” so she knew he thought she was Jewish.
    He probably didn’t care that Bassam spoke very good English.
    Liyana’s legs started shaking. Her mouth opened wide and puffed out nothing. She felt feverish. She could have fainted on the ground.
    The man said one more thing. “Be smart.” Then he turned and walked away. Satisfied.
    Later Liyana wished she had chased him through the streets and hit him with her little spice bag. She could have swung it into his face till coriander clouded up his eyes.
    Bassam didn’t say a word. He turned away and busied himself brushing spice crumbs off his table.
    All the way home the words she hadn’t said kept crying out inside her. “I’m an animal, too! Oh, I’m so proud to be an animal, too!”
    She couldn’t tell Poppy. She felt she had betrayed him.
    What, she wondered, would Sitti have said?
    Sitti might have howled like a coyote.

R
AFIK’S WISHES
    He wished for a whole basket of yellow pomelo fruits, sweeter than grapefruits, to eat by himself.
    A German archaeologist was coming over for dinner. Rafik, starving as usual, flitted around their rooms saying, “I wish she’d hurry up. I wish I wish I wish.”
    “Bro, you’re always wishing,” Liyana said. She was reading about the old kings and queens of England for her history class. Now there was an unhappy group.
    Rafik wished he could do his homework sitting straight up in the salt of the Dead Sea. He wished he could dig a hole so deep, he’d find a lost city. Or a scroll.
    He wished someone would lower him into a well. When Poppy was a boy, he’d been lowered into a village well on ropes because his aunts and uncles wanted to know what was down there.
    Inside the musty hole, Poppy discovered secret shelves and shallow corridors dug into its sides above the water level. He shone his light onancient clay jars. Maybe they’d been lined up there from biblical times.
    Poppy lifted out a deep blue vessel with a wide round mouth and a clay stopper. Small dried-up carob seeds rattled around inside.
    Dozens of village people came by to see it that night. “How many jars are down there?” they asked him.
    “Hundreds.”
    They had a town meeting about it. What should they do?
    Poppy kept shivering inside. What if he had seen bones? Skeletons and skulls?
    And why did the ancestors hide their jars inside a well, anyway? Maybe the jars were filled with precious oils back then. Maybe the well was a secret hiding place in case of invasion.
    The villagers decided not to tell anybody. If they told, no telling what would happen—already the countryside teemed with jeeps and foreigners and curious expeditions.
    Poppy said he could never look at a well in the same way again. He went back to his own family house in Jerusalem and started wondering what might be buried inside the
walls
.
    All this made Rafik want to
discover
something.
    “It’s part of your heritage,” Poppy told him. “Dig, dig, dig.”
    Finally the archaeologist appeared, smelling faintly of perspiration, and they dove into their cucumbermint soup. She wore a khaki shirt and a gold necklace charm shaped like a shovel. She told about the project she’d been digging on for ten years, in the desert near Jericho. “It takes
patience
” she said, looking at Liyana as if she didn’t have any. How did she know?
    Rafik asked her if he could apply for a job.
    She