Naomi Shihab Nye
Local Hospitality

This is the story he told me exactly as I heard it.

He thought it would be simple going back to the village. He and his wife would visit their families, unpack the bolts of fresh velvet and cakes of sweet soap. They would sit up late into the dark, telling stories they had collected in the United States over the past four years, and everyone would be happy to see them, as if their own lives had somehow been confirmed. What could he easier?

Since their departure, their neighbor Abu Mohammed had installed a genuine white porcelain toilet in a closet off his courtyard and Zaki's father, Abu Zaki, had become the new mukhtar, or mayor, which really just meant he drank a little more coffee and knew a little more gossip than anyone else. Sometimes he would be called upon to settle a minor dispute, in which case he would improve his posture, puff up his chest and gesture dramatically, hut mostly the days in the village were as slow and roundly curved as Zaki remembered. How much can stones and chickens change?

Sitti, his grandmother, commented that Zaki was wearing paler colors. She asked in her most serious voice if he had forgotten how to pray. Zaki told her the universe he and his wife lived in now was as different from her universe as the moon from the sun. 'No!' she said. 'The moon and sun are not different. They float in the same sky.' When he tried to tell her about the American high school next door to his apartment complex, where boys and girls kissed and held one another in the parking lot at lunchtime, she shook her head. 'Ya'Allah, maybe a different sky after all,' she said. She stared at him doubtfully, as if he were a new man with a name she couldn't pronounce. 'Give me some bread,' he said, to bring her back to earth. And she nodded, passing the bread.

His father pretended to be angry that he and his wife were only visiting and weren't going to stay. He acted as if he hadn't known this all along. Originally his sons had each gone to America to study, but later they found jobs, and now all six were in the process of becoming citizens. What sorrow must this be for the ones who stayed home? Zaki tried not to think about it. His own citizenship papers had been signed and delivered three weeks before his trip, but now he didn't feel like mentioning it. His wife Suheila would apply for her citizenship soon. Once you went to America your mind stretched out like a wide field and became too big for the village. To live back home again would be like trying to make a big thing shrink.

Zaki's father couldn't understand this. He had never left the village for more than three days, and then only to travel thirty miles to Jerusalem to see a doctor about his closed-up ear. When he came home, he kept saying it was hard to breathe in the city, you had to share the air with too many lungs. Now he kept mumbling, 'So what is this I hear? You're going back again? For what reason? You want make more money or what? You could build a nice house here and settle down.' Fidgeting and fussing when their backs were turned.

Zaki and Suheila spent a whole month telling their bunch of stories. A new cousin or old schoolmate would appear and they would tell the same story a different way. Maybe a fact would sprout wings and disappear, leaving room for something fancier. After a week, Zaki realized he'd stopped looking at his watch. He started sleeping later and arguing more. Suheila commented that people argued most where there was least to talk about. If conversation was rich and subjects many, talk kept rolling fluidly, passing over rough spots like water over rocks. But once everything had been said, you started paddling backwards, flinging water and scraping your knees. Suheila said she was seeing the village like a movie for the first time and learning who the main characters were. Suheila loved movies. She learned English at the movies. She talks a little like Omar Sharif.

As their visit neared its conclusion, Zaki's grandmother began making prophecies about the end of her life. 'When you pack your bags,' she said, 'I will take my last breath. When the taxi arrives to drive you to the airport, when your plane rises into the sky ...' She was planning to die each time. She had said this to Zaki four years earlier and repeated it to every visiting brother. Zaki wondered if that were the secret to her long life - keep dying, and death won't find you. She said everyone would forget her and their worlds would be filled with sorrow. She said itwas impossible to leave your village and be happy anywhere else, and did they think they could bring her a better sweater on their next trip home? Zaki loved Sitti just as much as he had loved her when he was a boy. Her logic was so elegantly simple To live as she lived would be a gift - but people didn't do that anymore. Only a few rare ones remained and the most we could do now was listen to them.

Of course there would be a huge farewell dinner the night before they left. Two lambs were to be slaughtered, the women would cook mountains of rice, and pastel egg-shaped almonds from Jordan would appear in every ceramic bowl. Zaki's mother sent a message through Zaki to her brother-in-law who ran a store in the next town: 'Send glasses, and napkins, and some of those mints if you can give me a better price than last time. Send garlic and the largest sacks of rice. Three packages of lace for our dresses, red thread, and remember the last time you sent hummous? The beans were small and dried-up. Please send some better ones and I will forget the past.'

Zaki carried this message half-heartedly, and couldn't say he delivered it exactly as it had been given. All the relatives would be invited, a number that might exceed one hundred dinner guests or more, if cousins of cousins decided to show. Zaki thought about the United States, remembering the pleasant dinner parties they had attended in the previous few years, backyard barbecues or neat buffets where five or six couples served their own plates and sat around having relaxed conversations. In America you didn't issue invitations to a whole town - you invited people, you knew who was coming. In the village they invited everyone and they never knew.

Three days before their departure, Zaki and Suheila decided to travel over to the next town once more to visit the home of Uncle Khaled, Abu Zaki's brother, who ran the store. He had asked them to stay longer on the day they did the shopping, but Suheila had a headache, so they declined. Now Zaki was thinking they should at least go tour his new house more closely, since he had built it recently and was very proud. Zaki's father and mother gathered themselves up at the last minute and said they would accompany them, and at the last minute three bored young cousins added to their group, along with their father's ancient friend Tawfiq the Bird Man. They called him 'Bird Man' because he kept cages of wild birds and pigeons in his courtyard. Tawfiq never ate his birds. He talked to them. He used to say they told him how to live.

Sitti stayed home to embroider the dresses. Even with her old eyes, she sewed tiny golden figures, winged birds and water pitchers along the edges of her white dress. Zaki wished everyone weren't going to so much trouble. It made him nervous. They were even embroidering a fabulous dress for Suheila at her mother's house, though she'd worn only clothes from Marshall Field's and Mervyn's since her arrival.

Uncle Khaled's place sat on the side of a hill near a grove of baby olive trees. His house was built from a new pinkish tint of stone. This seemed to irritate Zaki's father. Why couldn't he have used the same grey stone they had been using for centuries? 'I heard he has a bathtub,' Abu Zaki said in a low, disgusted voice. So what? Zaki had heard of this infamous bathtub at least ten times from ten different people, who seemed to think it an insult to tradition to have a tub inside a room. They still favored the metal tub in the courtyard, water poured out of a jug, or a shower spigot over a drain.

'Coffee or tea?' Uncle Khaled offered, obviously pleased that so many people had come to see him in the middle of a Friday afternoon. The coffee was thick and sweet as ever, in fine white china cups. It was the coffee Zaki had missed for four years, though they made it in the United States themselves on their sleek electric stove. Something about that coffee, lightly spiced with ground cardamom, always made Zaki. feel the world was smooth and at peace. No matter that soldiers were banging the heads of citizens three miles away; the coffee offered reprieve. Zaki's mother surprised him by accepting a cigarette along with the men. He had never seen her smoke before. His father whispered, 'She only does it where Sitti can't see.'

They talked about the fine furniture and the artistic design of the house. Uncle Khaled's wife Nabeela, Zaki's mother's sister, was happy to see them again. In the village everyone was related at least twice. Americans say this makes the children idiots, but the village didn't seem to have more idiots than its share. Nabeela talked about their two sons, away at college in Damascus. They had to travel through Jordan to get there and back, but they were getting so smart it was worth it. This irritated Zaki's father again; on the surface, he was prouder of sons who had gone to the United States than he would have been of sons in Syria, but in his heart he wished his own were closer to home. Nabeela's sons would probably come back to the village to live when they graduated. They would marry Arab girls, as Zaki had, and settle back to have six babies and a lifetime of visiting, as he had not.

Zaki talked of prices in America and the special plate he liked to order at the cafeteria. Suheila described laundromats. They told of the brilliantly lit up signs in the streets. At first it had seemed strange to walk or ride down a boulevard and have a hundred shining signs to look at. Here at home, the night belonged to the moon. Electricity was rationed, three hours each evening. A few people had televisions, but not refrigerators, except the generator kind, since three hours a day wouldn't be enough. Even the radios here only ran on batteries. Tawfiq began telling a bird story Zaki had heard from him before, about a bird who wanted to be a radio. It had never made sense before, either. 'So the bird found itself one day in a tree and began weeping the invisible tears of birds, which changed into fruits, and that is why we have all these new fig trees appearing in the village!' It sounded to Zaki as though he had two or three stories mixed up.

Nabeela leaned over to Suheila and asked if they were planning to stay for supper. It was then around three, and they'd eaten lunch after one. 'Oh no,' Suheila whispered. 'We'll need to go back. We've promised my parents we'll eat with them tonight.'

On the table before them sat a plate of mamool, little domed cookies stuffed with dates or nuts and rolled in powdered sugar. Zaki's mother said Nabeela made better mamool than anyone else in the family, but Nabeela insisted their Aunt Mary's were much better.

'What is your job?' Uncle Khaled asked Zaki again. They all knew what his job was, but they liked to keep hearing it. 'I run a clothing store,' he said. 'I am manager of a clothing store that is part of a chain.' They didn't understand what a 'chain' was. Zaki explained about businesses in America, how sometimes there were main offices in distant cities and you worked years and years for a man you never saw. Or a woman, he added, and that got them. A woman? Zaki had lived twenty-one years in the old country before emigrating, and should have known better than to bring up a pesky subject like that; next he made the mistake of mentioning that as soon as Suheila finished her last two counseling classes she hoped to get a job in a school for children or a home for old people.

'What do you mean, a home for old people?' demanded Tawfiq. He was nearly a hundred himself. Suheila poked Zaki. He was traveling dangerous ground with his last few comments, like walking naked in a no-man's-land.

'Tawfiq, in America, some of the old people are too weak to live alone,' Zaki said.
'Haki fadi!' he grunted. 'Empty talk!'

Abu Zaki coughed and looked around the room. A light breeze lifted the curtains. There were no screens. He rubbed his hands together in his lap and leaned forward suddenly with his serious mukhtar face, as though he were about to make a decision.

'Tell me, Khaled,' he said to his brother. 'Has this fancy new house changed your ways? Are you trying to bring new customs to the villages? Do you know we have sat here for an hour visiting already and you have not once mentioned any dinner to us? Don't you think the guests from America might be hungry?'

'Oh no!' Zaki almost shouted. 'We're not! Nabeela already asked us and we told her we're eating later! Please, Abuki, we can take care of ourselves.'

His father looked at him angrily. 'Take care of yourselves? Perhaps. But who can Khaled take care of?'

'Ya'Allah, brother,' said Khaled, looking sick and stuttering. 'I am sorry; you know we finished lunch ourselves right before you came and I was so full I was not even thinking of food. Nabeela, what do we have to eat? Get these young people some bread and meat!'
'Please, no,' Suheila was pulling Nabeela's arm. 'We want nothing. We just wanted to see you.'

Nabeela was making hand signals at Khaled, circles in the air, and shaking her head. 'What is the meaning of this?' he shouted at her. 'Speak!'
'I think we are out of bread,' she whispered.
At that moment Zaki's cousin Farouki, a strange and silent man, rose and walked out of the house. 'Where is he going?' Abu Zaki demanded. 'What is wrong with that character?'
'Please Papa,' begged Zaki, 'don't be so angry at everyone. Let's go on with the stories; no one has the slightest appetite.'

By this time Nabeela was in the kitchen, pulling out drawers. Suheila had followed her, protesting. Zaki's mother lit her fifth cigarette, while the other two cousins joined Abu Zaki's call for justice.
'We are losing the old ways,' Saleem protested. 'It is not important if someone is or is not hungry, but that food is offered, this is what counts.'
'But it is three in the afternoon!' Zaki cried. 'We are between meals now. Is anyone really hungry?'

His cousin Samih started telling of a house he had visited in the town of Ramallah where the people never fed him from sunup to sundown.
'Who were these selfish heathens?' croaked Tawfiq the Bird Man, happy to be enraged.
Uncle Khaled looked as though he were in great pain. 'I believe in the customs,' he said, though no one but Zaki was listening. 'All my life I have tried to weave together the old and new, keeping the best of the old yet trying to move forward at the same time. In this house you will see the arches of the old architecture and yet there are plastic dishes in the kitchen. I beg your consideration for my full stomach, which forgot its manners, but soon everything will be well again.'

'I'm not hungry,' Zaki said loudly. He whispered to his uncle, 'Listen, my father is just talking like he always does. Pay no attention to him and please, may I see your bathtub?' This seemed to make Khaled even sadder.

Farouki returned from the market with his arms full of bread, at least thirty loaves. He dropped them on the coffee table in front of everyone. 'So eat,' he instructed them. 'Eat and eat till the day is done.'

Nabeela appeared with a tray of warm meatballs and a dish of cold eggplant dip. 'But we have no more bread,' she was saying, till she saw the bread on the table and looked surprised. Uncle Khaled rose, saying he was going to his own store to get a better kind of bread. 'But we aren't hungry!' Zaki shouted. 'Are you hungry? Is anyone hungry?'

Abu Zaki, apparently not to be outdone by his brother, the poor host, or his strange nephew, stood up and said he would be back shortly with all the necessary supplies.
'Father, we're leaving!' Zaki shouted. 'We're going away! We're going to fly back to America this instant without saying goodbye!' Sometimes it works to fight logic with logic and craziness with craziness. This truth, however, cannot be depended on.

A half hour later, everyone was back. Zaki and Suheila had been muttering together in the drowsy living room, waiting for them. Two flies had mated on the arm of a chair, and Zaki's mother had fallen asleep, her ashtray full in front of her. At least sixty loaves of flat bread were now piled on the coffee tables and cabinets. Nabeela had prepared soup and a salad of cucumbers and radishes. She moved in and out of the kitchen like a sleepwalker.

Now that they had all this food in front of them, Zaki's father and uncle had stopped speaking to one another. The cousins declined. Zaki's mother woke up, tasted one meatball and some salad, but said no bread, thank you, she wasn't hungry enough for bread. Only Tawfiq the Bird Man was eating. He picked at his food like a sparrow, telling weird stories with wrong endings, and no one asked Zaki or Nabeela anything else about the United States for the rest of the visit.

Three nights later they were all dressed and perfumed for the farewell feast when a young boy appeared from Uncle Khaled's village to say that none of the family from over there would be coming. Abu Zaki, the mukhtar, had cast a shadow over the relatives. He had insulted his own brother in front of women and his son. Neither would the family of Nabeela, Zaki's mother, be attending, since they had heard the terrible story and could not permit themselves to socialize with Zaki's family again so soon. The villages were temporarily divided, those who loved or were related to Khaled or Nabeela standing firm against the mukhtar. No matter that they were related to the mukhtar just as much; for the moment, they weren't claiming him. A few tender-hearted women sent consolation gifts to Zaki's mother. No one even seemed to remember Suheila and Zaki, and weren't they the ones who were leaving, the whole reason or the party?

Zaki's grandmother Sitti stood in the doorway of the house, watching the sky. 'It's going to rain tomorrow,' she said gloomily. 'You won't be able to fly. And it's a bad sign here too, we have killed the lambs and no one is coming to eat them. That means something terrible is about to happen. If you leave us and the plane falls out of the sky, I will die.'
'So will we,' Zaki said, hugging her. Later they stuffed themselves with tripple the usual amount of food, to make up for all the people who weren't there.

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Last modified on October 19, 2005  | © Telegram 2005