Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “You really meaning you will?”

  “Spit on my grave and hope to die.”

  A crashing sound like a metal gong rang through the length of the truck, the floor shivering under their feet.

  “What the fuck,” Train said, looking out.

  Melvina was poised, bat in both hands. She’d just struck the truck and was preparing to launch another blow while Jem struggled to restrain her. They could hear the girls’ voices raised in disagreement, muffled through the truck window. Then Melvina, fixed on her intended target, shouted, “If you value your lives give yourselves up! The police are here and you are surrounded!”

  Matussem looked over and saw the Clay County sheriff’s car parked in the driveway, the sheriff lighting a cigar.

  “That girl has initiative,” Train said.

  Jem thought even Melvina seemed a bit taken aback by the sort of noise she could produce by bouncing a baseball bat off the side of a truck. Melvina shouted a few more things, and then they stood there in the bowl of reverberation that the bat had hollowed out of the air. Sheriff Giaconda sat in the driveway; he’d been summoned by Melvina several times over the years for various “disturbances.” Generally he didn’t bother to get out of the car anymore. He’d pull up, someone would lean out the living-room window to wave him on, and he’d drive away.

  When the truck door opened, Melvie hoisted her bat again, pointing it at the door. The first thing Jem heard was Matussem’s voice. “Melvie? Is Daddy-o! You can put down your cannon, we are coming.” Matussem climbed out, waving at Sheriff Giaconda, who started his engine. The sheriff stuck his head out the window and shouted, “Hey, you want to come over for the Orangemen next weekend?”

  Matussem shouted back, “Yeah, I call you, dudeman.”

  They all watched as the sheriff backed out, waving the tip of his cigar at them.

  Then she was there. Coming through the door of the cab right behind Matussem, more and more and more of her, big as the Statue of Liberty once she was all out. Jem stared and said, “Oh, boy.” Melvina pointed and shouted, “You! It’s you!”

  The woman looked like she was trying to shrink so they couldn’t see her behind Matussem. But there was too much hair, halter, torrential thighs. She grinned and said, “Howdy, gals. Things got a little carried away, I guess. I was just giving your daddy a lift home.”

  Melvina squared off with Matussem. “Well, well, Mr. Ramoud,” she said, looking from him to the woman, back to him again. This was not what Melvie had expected. She mentally arranged and rearranged the two plaques on her desk at work, the ones that said Right and Wrong. She said, “Need I remind you, Mr. Ramoud, of the sacred memory of our dear, sainted mother, may she rest in peace.”

  “Holy shitskis, I had no idea. A dead mother,” the woman said.

  Matussem shrugged. “We didn’t have whole lots of talk time.”

  “And you.” Melvina swiveled toward the woman. “I singlehandedly saved the life of your reprobate, if not to say criminal, man friend. And this is how you pay me back, hijacking and corrupting my father. What more do you want from me, maybe a bone-marrow transplant? Heart, lungs, liver, or kidneys perhaps?”

  The woman tucked in her chin and averted her eyes. “All right, let’s cut the morals.” She reached for her back pocket. Melvie braced herself, hoisting the bat, but the woman only produced a gray square of paper. “My card,” she said, handing it to Melvie. “Anytime you and your baseball bat want to come aboard, I got a place waiting, kiddo. You can tell them robots down to the hospital to take their job and shove it.”

  Melvie read the card and placed it in her jacket pocket. “Evidence,” she said curtly. “Now if you’re quite through, Madame, I’m warning you, move that truck or I shall make a citizen’s arrest.”

  Train shrugged, climbed back up, and waved to everyone. She leaned out the window toward Matussem and said, “Matty, baby, my philosophy is don’t torture your kids. It never works out.” The truck rolled off the lawn, churning up two tracks of earth, grass ground into the tire treads.

  Jem made a sound, lifted her hand to her temples.

  “Jemorah,” Melvie said, taking her sister’s arm. “What? The lawn? Talk to me, tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I—I don’t—there’s nothing really wrong.”

  “Is it that trucker woman? Did she upset you? Should I go after her?”

  The truck was already moving through Euclid’s flashing red light, gears shifting and a puff of smoke like the Wizard of Oz’s. Jem shook her head. “Mom.” Her voice was quiet. “She—that woman—she didn’t look anything like her. I don’t know why, but something about her reminded me of our mother. I couldn’t stop thinking it.”

  Matussem turned, his eyes lifting. “It was mouth,” he said, drawing his fingers across his lips. “Her smile. The same. Like a feather is.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Melvie said. “I would have remembered. I have perfect recall.” But her eyes softened almost to shadow and followed the diesel smoke as it faded on the road.

  FOUAD WAS CRANING to watch everything from the window in the living room. “Look at that. Did you see that? What going on out there? What car I see in the backyard? They having the party time of their life, I want go see.”

  “Forget it, O greasy Fouad,” his wife, Rima, said in Arabic. She was sitting against him on the couch with one hand clamped on his wrist. “Lucky for you, my sons at least will still talk to me. Them and that Girbert Abu-Sesame. That’s their car, the latest that you bought for them. They’re the ones who gave me directions here. A nice quiet car, so quiet I can sneak in the back and they don’t notice. You are going nowhere now, Mr. Slippery.”

  Matussem and his daughters walked into the house and found them sitting there, Rima ramrod straight and Fouad so slumped down his head was practically on the seat of the couch.

  “Sister!” Matussem said and hurried to her. He touched her and kissed both cheeks over and over. “Ah’lan wa sah’lan, keef ha’lick! Long time no see. This is a really a day and a half!”

  She sat in queen bee fashion, eldest of the Ramoud women, counting up everything life owed her. She turned wooden eyes to Jem and Melvina and held out both hands. The girls kissed their aunt’s hands and felt her fingers tighten around theirs as she dragged them closer and peered into their faces. “Still not married, written all over them, ha!” she said in English and released them.

  “Oldest sister of mine, how many year has been?” Matussem said. “I don’t believe these is you in my own house.”

  “Enough of bullshit, Matussem,” Rima said. “I come get husband back before you murders finish him. Putting him some—some prostitutes and all the time booze, bad foods, poisons, so now look see!” she struck Fouad’s chest with the back of her hand. “He looking like a hanger, hangnail, what you call that—all crumple? I have to come get before you are kills him all.”

  Rima and Fouad stood up, Rima in a full-length caftan glittering with gold thread. Fouad patted his stomach and nodded at everyone. “America life, my friends, is like eat clams, can’t digest, and so too much.”

  Rima muttered to Matussem in Arabic, “If God wills it, we will meet again, the day you finally come back. Where you belong. In the meantime, send your daughters to me. I’ll fix them up with some half-decent matches. Never mind my hopeless sons. If you come back home, we can find you a new wife, too. Au revoir, baby brother.”

  Once their car had driven away Matussem said, “Fouad remind me by the jazz guy who say, ‘The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.’”

  THAT NIGHT FOUAD was asleep on a jet, dreaming of a dancing girl in Syracuse under whose veils and spangles he had drunk. America faded behind him, the parties, the nights out, as well as the charges—several thousand or so for furniture, clothes, ceramic animals—he’d rung up at Montgomery Ward, Sears, and elsewhere, giving Matussem’s address. He was dreaming of the soft crush of the dancer’s thighs and the way he and all the other men watched and dran
k and waited until it all evaporated in the daylight like a mist.

  Matussem, asleep in his house, dreamed he was looking into a mirror; his face, thin and ghostly, slipped across its surface. He was dreaming of what his wife had seen when she looked at him, the dark of his skin, deep enough to fall into.

  In Jem’s dream she heard her mother’s voice telling her, as she had used to, “Be bold, be bold. You should learn about yourself by learning the world. See how things come apart and go back together again.”

  JEM WOKE FROM her dream in the middle of the night thinking of middle school Earth Science. In May of their second year in Euclid, toward the end of seventh grade, Jem went strolling in search of a science fair project and found the fields glittering with perfect, translucent bones, partial skeletons, beaks and claws. The neighboring farm was too close to the road and its chickens were always getting hit by cars. The carcasses would putrefy in the sun until the bones were stripped clean by field animals. Jem carried some home and washed them in the bathtub.

  This was three years after their mother’s death. In the quiet around their house in the country, Jem’s project became a matter of going to the secret insides of life. Melvina would sit in a big chair cradling an anatomy book filled with bones, muscles, crosscutting ligaments, and the staring eyeball of a skinless chicken, supervising as Jem worked with toothpicks and Elmer’s Glue-All. Melvie would not let Jem substitute even a vertebra that seemed a little “off.” The fieldcombing went on for weeks, Melvie dragging the anatomy book in her red wagon, searching for the precise tibia, the perfect left claw. Each bone was a particle of understanding, Jem’s mind growing deft as she began to know what she was building.

  In the end they had to support one faulty wing tip with a toothpick. Melvie woke Jem with a flashlight at midnight before the fair to request one last bone hunt. But the model was entered as it stood. After it received awards for creativity, accuracy, and a blue ribbon, Melvina announced to everyone that her sister was going to become a scientist. But Jem thought about the mirror her work had shown to her, turning her inside herself, and she knew that she wanted to study the mind.

  Chapter 29

  MATUSSEM DIDN’T WANT to go back. Not even when, three weeks after leaving, Uncle Fouad had gone ahead and mailed him a plane ticket. Not even, as Melvie put it, in restitution for emotional anguish and physical hardship in having to deal with Fouad.

  “What do you mean, you don’t want to go?” Melvina barked at her father over the dinner table. “I can’t believe this. Your ticket is for tomorrow.”

  Matussem shrugged, sitting on his hands and eyeing his salad. He wouldn’t meet Melvie’s eye. “Don’t want to go, they don’t know how to have fun there.”

  “Fun!” Melvina’s voice. “Who’s talking about fun? What do you care about fun? I thought you were such a big American—don’t you want to learn how to be a tourist like everybody else? Look at me, I don’t care about fun. Jem doesn’t care about fun! Hilma Otts across the street with six more kids, do you think she cares about fun? No! Besides, being a tourist is fun, don’t you know that? You see new things, you have an educational experience—”

  “Already seen it,” Matussem said, mashing his mashed potatoes with his fork. “You go, how ’bout?”

  Melvina looked at him piously, her voice dropped to a devout level. “This is your homeland, your people, this is a journey to your past, to all of our pasts.”

  “Boring. No fun.”

  Melvie turned to Jem, who simply shrugged. It was possible that Melvie might have surrendered then and there, but a dangerous furrow came into her brow. Melvie crossed her arms and said, “‘Well now, something here reminds me of Za’enti da’ar, and people who don’t even realize when they’re looking out the window of a burning house.”

  A wave passed over Matussem’s face; he glanced up from his potatoes. “So well, well, what that suppose to mean, Melvina, you heartpicker.”

  Melvina turned blasé. She lifted her palms in the air and said, “It’s your story, you tell it.”

  Matussem put down his fork and knife, recognition opening in his face.

  MATUSSEM WAS STANDING at the kitchen window that evening, staring out, seeing wild mustangs, box canyons, buffalo jumps, and desert basins. He could see all the way from the swamps of Euclid to the Wild West. He imagined wandering there, shedding his skin in the seams of the earth.

  He remembered that as a child he’d listened to sailors and soldiers. They played the music of the world to him, sang in his village’s marketplace, danced with each other on holiday. One of them played a tape machine in the village center and Matussem heard Dizzy Gillespie walk over the ocean, part the veil of dust, and speak. It was his first intimation of home.

  Euclid, lost to the rest of the world, was Matussem’s private land, like the country his parents tried to leave as they made lives in Jordan, as they let go of their children’s memories and let them grow up as Jordanians. Matussem was only two when the family left Nazareth. Still he knew there had been a Palestine for his parents; its sky formed a ceiling in his sleep. He dreamed of the country that had been, that he was always returning to in his mind.

  After they’d moved to Euclid, he found there were ways to lose himself in a place. Euclid, my misplaced past, he thought when he walked the gravel roads, past shacks and barking dogs. When he first saw Euclid he remembered it, every silver leaf and broken-backed creek. Nora had been his history once; now only the land was left.

  HE WOKE THE next morning an hour before his alarm would go off and lay back into the unexpected interval. It was his most vulnerable time, the moment of waking, when things rushed into his mind. He would be leaving for Jordan today. He watched sunrise touching his windowshades and in that moment he recalled his dream: a terrible golden snake. He stared at the shades, remembering the day he fell into the well.

  He had been a young boy living in Beit’oon, his father’s village where almost everyone was related in some way. The well was off in a corner where no one ever went, only half finished and abandoned, yet quite deep to a young boy, a child of seven. He and his cousin Faisal liked to balance on the squat stone wall that encircled it. A dangerous game, he had known even at the time, that had proved irresistible.

  At first it was easy, like balancing on any rock. But more and more Matussem felt compelled to look down into the hole; there was no helping it. One day he looked into that pushing, pulling center of gravity. In one tilting moment his arms flew out; he fought for balance, then the speck of light at the bottom, like the gleam in an eye, flew up at him.

  His hands and feet swept the webby stone sides, then he crashed into two feet of mud and water at the bottom. He had gone rubbery with fear and shock and somehow landed with just a few scratches. When he attempted to stand, the mud seemed to rock and suck him in. He craned back and watched the opening above him perform a feat he later saw repeated in Hollywood thrillers: the opening telescoped back. So that while it was only fifteen feet distant, it looked nearly as faint to Matussem as a star.

  Falling, he’d heard Faisal shout, a private peal of terror. When Faisal’s face failed to appear over the edge, Matussem knew he was going to die. The air at the base of the well was foul; it smelled like old dung, and he tried not to remember if this was one of the places he and his friends would stop to piss while playing outdoors.

  The walls were almost close enough for him to touch his fingertips to both sides at once. He felt the slime of the wall, brittle crud covered by slickness. His feet disappeared into gray mud; he shivered; he heard a sound like a squeak. Then he felt something slithering between his legs, twining around one ankle.

  Till that point, he’d been resigned to a clammy death by suffocation. Now suddenly he found his lungs filling up, his throat producing a piercing, magnified cry up the stone sides like a voice in a megaphone. When the men came running with ropes and he emerged, coughing, soggy, caked in mud and lime, Faisal was sitting all the way across the courtyard on the groun
d. He looked over at Matussem blankly, as if to say, Where did you come from?

  For years after that, Matussem had dreams that he was being pursued by snakes, fat ones, little ones, that raced behind him, tongues flickering. He became afraid of water. Sometimes he woke in the morning and felt they were still chasing him.

  MATUSSEM WALKED UPSTAIRS to the living room. He sat by one of the long-paned windows and watched the dawn. Small birds went by, flat as Ontario snowflakes, off into the sky. Clouds were etched into gradients of blue, from the crown of the sky to the nape of the hills. He moved again, and from the kitchen he could see the gas-station lights by the edge of the creek; the firs along the hill still black with night.

  When he was sixteen and finished with his schooling at the small country house in Beit’oon, seventy-one relatives came from all around Jordan, the West Bank, and Beirut to the party his father threw for him. The men arranged their seats in a huge circle, shoulder to shoulder, and Matussem and his father sat in the center, as his father held forth on the subject of “life.” Matussem remembered more clearly than anything in the world the tent walls flapping, the edges of the wind, and his father’s voice, the sound of his Arabic, intelligent and complicated: “Trust only your enemies. Women are the possessors of magic. The devil resides in a bored man.” Though the family had struggled with poverty, their father was generous to visitors with food and shelter, respected by all the village for his insight and sense of justice. His powerful voice evoked his blood ties to royalty, mathematicians, and ancient poets. It was the voice that Matussem would later draw from his drums; in their undercurrents, he heard his father speaking again. He had known—even as he had listened to his father speak of history, of continuity—that he would be leaving someday, to a place where he could create himself. Two years later, his father was dead and Matussem left for the New World. His drums were now the only way back to his father’s voice.