Crescent

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Sirine narrows her eyes. “Wait a second—you said this is the story of how to fall in love? Is there even a woman in this one?”

  Her uncle tilts back his head, eyebrows lift, tongue clicks: this means, no, or, wait, or, foolish, or, you just don’t understand. “Take my word for it,” he says. “Love and prayer are intimately related.” He sighs. Then he says slyly, “So I hear Professor Handsome was in today eating some of your tabbouleh. Again.”

  Once again, her uncle is speaking of Hanif Al Eyad, the new hire in the Near Eastern Studies Department at the university. Hanif has come into the restaurant four times since arriving in town several weeks ago and her uncle keeps introducing him to Sirine, saying their names over and over, “Sirine, Hanif, Hanif, Sirine.”

  Sirine leans over the cutting board she has balanced on her knees and steadies the lemon. “I really don’t know who you’re referring to.”

  Her uncle gestures with both arms. “He’s tremendous, covered with muscles, and shoulders like this—like a Cadillac—and a face like I don’t know what.”

  “Well, if you don’t know, I certainly don’t,” Sirine says as she slices the lemon.

  Her uncle lounges back in his big blue chair. “No, really, you can’t believe it, I’m telling you, he looks like a hero. Like Ulysses.”

  “That’s supposed to sound good?”

  He leans over and picks up the unsliced half of lemon, sniffs it, then bites into one edge.

  “I don’t know how you do that,” Sirine says.

  “If I were a girl, I’d be crazy for Ulysses.”

  “What does Ulysses even look like? Some statue-head with no eyes?”

  “No,” he says, indignant. “He has eyes.”

  “Still not interested.”

  He frowns, pushes his glasses up; they slide back down. “As you know, if you’re fifty-two, that makes me eighty-four—”

  “Except that I’m thirty-nine.”

  “And very soon I won’t be here. On this planet.”

  She sighs and looks at him.

  “I would just like to see you with someone nice and charming and all those things. That’s all.”

  The grill at work is so wide Sirine must stand on tiptoes to reach all the way to the back. There are bright pans hanging from an overhead rack and magnetic rows of gleaming knives. Her arms are dashed with red slivers of burns, and as she bends to scrape the grill surface she feels its smell passing into her hair and clothes. Even after a day off, she can still catch whiffs of it as she turns her head. There is a ruby haze beneath the heat lamp, vapors rising from the stove, and everywhere the murmurings of the fans.

  Nadia’s Café is like other places—crowded at meals and quiet in between—but somehow there is also usually a lingering conversation, currents of Arabic that ebb around Sirine, fill her head with mellifluous voices. Always there are the same groups of students from the big university up the street, always so lonely, the sadness like blue hollows in their throats, blue motes for their wives and children back home, or for the American women they haven’t met. The Arab families usually keep their daughters safe at home. The few women who do manage to come to America are good students—they study at the library and cook for themselves, and only the men spend their time arguing and being lonely, drinking tea and trying to talk to Um-Nadia, Mireille, and Sirine. Especially Sirine. They love her food—the flavors that remind them of their homes—but they also love to watch Sirine, with her skin so pale it has the bluish cast of skim milk, her wild blond head of hair, and her sea-green eyes. She has the worst kind of hair for a chef, curly and viney and falling all over her shoulders, resisting ponytails and scarves and braids. She is so kind and gentle-voiced and her food is so good that the students cannot help themselves—they sit at the tables, leaning toward her.

  Um-Nadia, the owner of the café and all-around boss, is always tilting her hip against the students’ chairs, keeping them company—she wears a flowered pink housedress with a deep V in front—all soft cleavage and dangling gold hoops and high-heeled too-small slippers—while her daughter Mireille, and Victor Hernandez, the young Mexican busboy hopelessly in love with Mireille, and the Central American custodian Cristobal, and Sirine the chef are in motion around her.

  “Paradise,” Um-Nadia likes to say. “This life on earth is a paradise, if only we knew it.” Sirine has heard her say this so many times she knows how to say it in Arabic.

  Victor Hernandez, who looks a little like a short, Mexican Charlton Heston, smiles and raises his eyebrows at Mireille. Mireille looks away from him and frowns at the refrigerator.

  Nine years ago, in 1990, the café had been owned by an Egyptian cook and his wife and they called it Falafel Faraoh. They enjoyed a strong following among the impoverished university students, who would rotate in the Friday Falafel Special with their regular diet of burritos, egg rolls, and hamburgers. But the Americans began firing on Iraq in 1991 when Iraqi president Saddam Hussein advanced into Kuwait. And suddenly—amid all the students in their jeans and T-shirts and short shorts, and a smattering of skinny Middle Eastern exchange students in tight slacks who had quickly discovered that Falafel Faraoh tasted nothing like home—there were two grown men in business suits sitting at the counter every day writing things in pads. All they did was glance at the Middle Eastern students and take notes. A cool, impenetrable wall surrounded these two men, separating them from everyone else and growing by the day as they sat there, drinking coffee and speaking quietly to each other. People started whispering: C.I.A. Gradually the students seemed less enticed by the big specials or the colorful advertising banner draped out front. Business began to falter, then fail. One day, after a month of sitting at the counter, the two men took the cook aside and asked if he knew of any terrorist schemes developing in the Arab-American community. The poor man’s eyes grew round, his hands grew slippery with sweat and cooking grease, he squeezed his spatula till it hurt his palm; he saw the twin images of his own frightened face in the dark lenses of one of the stranger’s glasses. He’d never heard of such a thing in his life. He and his wife liked to watch Columbo at night: that was all he knew about intrigues or crime. He thought he was living in America. That night he called his Lebanese friend Um-Nadia—who used to own a little sidewalk café in Beirut—and asked if she’d like to buy a restaurant, cheap, and she said, sure, why not?

  The next month, Um-Nadia found Sirine, they scraped years of yellow grease off the walls, and reopened with a menu that claimed to be “Real True Arab Food.” The two men in sunglasses promptly reappeared at the counter, but Um-Nadia, who said she’d seen worse in Beirut, chased them off the premises flapping her kitchen towel at them.

  Um-Nadia says the loneliness of the Arab is a terrible thing; it is all-consuming. It is already present like a little shadow under the heart when he lays his head on his mother’s lap; it threatens to swallow him whole when he leaves his own country, even though he marries and travels and talks to friends twenty-four hours a day. That is the way Sirine suspects that Arabs feel everything—larger than life, feelings walking in the sky. And sometimes when she is awake in the center of the night, the night cool and succulent as heart of palm or a little chicken kabob, Sirine senses these feelings rushing in her own blood. But she was also born with an abiding sense of patience, an ability to live deeply and purely inside her own body, to stop thinking, to work, and to simply exist inside the simplest actions, like chopping an onion or stirring a pot.

  Sirine learned how to cook professionally working as a line cook and then a sous chef in the kitchens of French, Italian, and “Californian” restaurants. But when she moved to Nadia’s Café, she went through her parents’ old recipes and began cooking the favorite—but almost forgotten—dishes of her childhood. She felt as if she were returning to her parents’ tiny kitchen and her earliest memories.

  And the customers quickly returned to the restaurant, only this time there were many exchange students and immigrants from the Middle East. Sirine rolled
out dough early in the morning in her open kitchen behind the counter and discreetly watched the students sipping coffee, studying the newspapers, and having arguments. Everything about these young men seemed infinitely vulnerable and tender: their dense curling lashes, soft round noses and full lips, winnowed-away faces and chests.

  Sometimes she used to scan the room and imagine the word terrorist. But her gaze ran over the faces and all that came back to her were words like lonely, and young.

  Occasionally, a student would linger at the counter talking to Sirine. He would tell her how painful it is to be an immigrant—even if it was what he’d wanted all his life—sometimes especially if it was what he’d wanted all his life. Americans, he would tell her, don’t have the time or the space in their lives for the sort of friendship—days of coffee-drinking and talking—that the Arab students craved. For many of them the café was a little flavor of home.

  At Nadia’s Café, there is a TV tilted in the corner above the cash register, permanently tuned to the all-Arabic station, with news from Qatar, variety shows and a shopping channel from Kuwait, endless Egyptian movies, Bedouin soap operas in Arabic, and American soap operas with Arabic subtitles. There is a group of regulars who each have their favorite shows and dishes and who sit at the same tables as consistently as if they were assigned. There are Jenoob, Gharb, and Schmaal—engineering students from Egypt; Shark, a math student from Kuwait; Lon Hayden, the chair of Near Eastern Studies; Morris who owns the newsstand; Raphael-from-New-Jersey; Jay, Ron, and Troy from the Kappa Something Something fraternity house; Odah, the Turkish butcher, and his many sons. There are two American policemen—one white and one black—who come to the café every day, order fava bean dip and lentils fried with rice and onions, and have become totally entranced by the Bedouin soap opera plotlines involving ancient blood feuds, bad children, and tribal honor. There are students who come religiously, appearing at the counter with their newspapers almost every day for years, until the day they graduate and disappear, never to be seen again. And then there are the students who never graduate.

  Even though Nadia’s Café is in the middle of an Iranian neighborhood, there are few Iranian customers. After the long, bitter war between Iraq and Iran, some of Um-Nadia’s Iranian neighbors refused to enter the café because of Sirine, the Iraqi-American chef. Still, Khoorosh, the Persian owner of the Victory Market up the street, appeared on Sirine’s first day of work announcing that he was ready to forgive the Iraqis on behalf of the Iranians. He stood openmouthed when he saw white-blond Sirine, then finally blurted out, “Well, look at what Iraq has managed to produce!” He asked if she knew how to make the Persian specialty khoresht fessenjan, his favorite walnut and pomegranate stew, and when she promised to learn, he returned later in the day and presented her with a potted pomegranate tree.

  Sirine wears her hair tied back but still it hangs in damp tendrils all over, in the corner of her mouth, in her eyes. She works and listens to the bells ringing over the door, the door banging, conversations surging into argument and back again. There is always so much noise; there are birds arguing in the tree outside the kitchen window. Life is an argument! Um-Nadia says. When Sirine laughs and asks, what are they fighting about? Um-Nadia says, what else? The world.

  Sirine looks up, past the hood of the heat lamp, watching customers fill the tables. More students, stripling-thin, faces narrowed with exhaustion, loneliness, and talking. She is frying onions and working on two dishes at once, chopping eggplant and stirring the leben—a delicate mellow yogurt sauce that needs constant stirring or it will break—and she watches the argument at the latest table. Four of them, including Hanif Al Eyad, have just come in. Rectangles of light pass over them from the windows in the door as it opens and closes. There are voices blurring and unblurring, complicated gestures, winding hands and arms. It sounds like the same sort of argument the students are always having—about America, the Middle East, and who is wronging whom—this time it’s in Arabic, sometimes it’s in English, usually it’s a little of both.

  She’s noticed that Hanif frequently has an entourage of students in his wake, young men—and some women—who tentatively follow him, asking his opinion of things. Her main impressions of Hanif are of his hair, straight and shiny as black glass, and of a faint tropical sleepiness to his eyes. And there is his beautiful, lightly accented, fluid voice, dark as chocolate. His accent has nuances of England and Eastern Europe, like a complicated sauce.

  Sirine has just turned from the leben to the eggplant when Hanif bursts into English, “Of course I love Iraq, Iraq is my home—and there is, of course, no going home—” and then back into Arabic.

  She looks at him, the white of his teeth, the silky dram of skin, cocoa-bean brown. He’s well built, tall, and strong. He laughs and the others follow his laughter. Um-Nadia has stationed herself beside him. Standing, one hip against the table, she holds her hand out as if she will curl her knuckles right through his hair. She sighs, tilts one foot on its shiny worn heel, then pats the puffed top of her own hair. She looks over, still smiling, to Sirine behind the counter, and says, “Roasted lamb, rice and pine nuts, tabbouleh salad, apricot juice.” Then she blows a kiss.

  Hanif glances at Sirine. She looks down, quick, a bunch of parsley pinched in her fingertips, rocks the big cleaver through a profusion of green leaves, onions, cracked wheat. Suddenly she remembers the leben and hurries to the big potful of yogurt sauce, which is just on the verge of curdling.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sirine’s uncle leans forward over their kitchen table, watching Sirine as she scrapes a little more tabbouleh salad on to his dinner plate. “I’m so full, Habeebti,” he says. “Really, I couldn’t eat another bite.”

  “You didn’t eat any vegetables at all.” She stands and places the dishes in the sink. When she turns back, however, he is biting into a large, walnut-stuffed ma’mul cookie. She puts her hands on her hips.

  “So,” he says quickly, dusting crumbs away as if he could hide the evidence. “Isn’t it time for the next chapter of the moralless tale of Abdelrahman Salahadin?”

  Abdelrahman Salahadin carries himself like a handful of water.

  Abdelrahman Salahadin—such a long name. It takes forever to say.

  Unusual, granted, but venerable. A name of great compassion and beauty—“The Servant of the Merciful One”—Abdelrahman—and the name of a great warrior and liberator—Salah al-Din.

  Abdelrahman Salahadin was his mother’s favorite son.

  In the day his skin is cinnamon-and-honey-colored. At night he is almost invisible. He moves seemingly without moving, the way the eye moves over words on a page.

  There is a small wooden rowboat, rocking and hidden in the reeds. The Saudi slaver waits beside it, eyes downcast, modest as a suitor, come to purchase Abdelrahman and spirit him away, across the Red Sea, to his desert castle.

  The slaver helps Abdelrahman Salahadin into the boat. After they are settled, he rows and chats with Abdelrahman, trying to wow him with his studies on the language of the mermaids. Between strokes, he hands Abdelrahman Salahadin his payment: a small bag of gold, a gold anklet, and gold earrings.

  Abdelrahman inclines his ear toward the horizon as if listening for something. Finally, after they are well out to sea, surrounded by dark, secret swells, a distant canopy of rumbling clouds, he seems to receive an invisible signal and he stands. The slaver looks at him with something like pleading, perhaps already sensing what is about to happen. Abdelrahman lifts his arms and jumps; he spills into the water like honey from a jar, dense and bright, instantly gone.

  The slaver stands, mouth open. The boat rocks a little and he sits back down. He doesn’t know how to swim. He appeals to God, to the invisible entities of the earth and sky, knowing as he does that everything is written. He wrings his hands, curses his luck, the ocean, the miserable institution of slavery; he shakes his head. Then he begins to laugh.

  Classes started last week. The trees around the university are melting
late summer blossoms; they smell sweet as water and litter the curbs with chunks of purple petals. Even though this is Los Angeles, Sirine still walks or bicycles almost everywhere she needs to go—which is never far.

  It’s two miles from the door of her uncle’s house to the door of Nadia’s Café. And there’s a mile and a half between her uncle’s office on campus and the door of the café, a path that extends straight down Westwood Avenue, through the student-busy village, across big Wilshire (where “Walk” flashes to “Don’t Walk” before you’re even halfway across), past the bright showy movie marquee, into so-called Teherangeles, with the beauty parlors and bookstores and food markets and the names of everything in Farsi with its Arabic script and different meaning and none of the Americans can quite get that Arabs and Iranians are “completely different animals,” as Um-Nadia puts it. And when anyone asks Um-Nadia why did she decide to locate an Iraqi-Lebanese café (and are the Lebanese Arabs or Phoenicians or Druids or what? Her uncle just shrugs and says, “God only knows,” and Um-Nadia hits him on the shoulder and says grandly, “They’re not—they’re Lebanese!”) midslope, right in mid-Teherangeles, she shrugs and says, “God only knows. Where else am I going to put it?”

  In the mornings when her uncle does not insist on driving her to work, Sirine wakes early and braves the cars in order to ride her bike from West L.A. to Westwood. She’s used to the quick rhythms and physical demands of the kitchen and she likes to exert herself. Then she notices the flowering things around her, the plants with the fluted edges like feathered goblets, or striped pink blossoms floating before a storefront, or the two big twin palms in the Garden of the Birds behind Nadia’s café. Their long elegant trunks rub together when the wind comes up.