He looks at her and smiles and she says, almost curtly, “Uncle, please, watch the steps!”
And he says, “Ah yes, the terrible, fearsome steps.”
CHAPTER THREE
I would just like to point out at this moment, for the record, that accomplished uncles and storytellers are usually rewarded with plates of knaffea pastry. For the record.
Then we can get on with our story.
So Abdelrahman Salahadin, the wily cousin, crawls sideways under the wild, roving waves. He has spent so much time under the sea he wears it like a bedsheet. The gold pieces bump and crawl and stay tied tight inside the bag tucked inside the pocket with its golden button, knotted around Abdelrahman Salahadin’s smooth muscle of a body.
The fish turn their heads and theorize that they have seen a phantasm, a pink-palmed jinn, a ghost from one of the drowned cities. The waves throw their shuttered light over his face and limbs and he is handsome as an old-time Egyptian movie star. Jellyfish awake from their dreaming-lives, crabs put away their poetry, shrimps shudder like castanets. He does not swim so much as dance, arms spread, legs flung, head back, eyes open as day. What a being he is.
Every time he does this, he tells himself, it is the last time. It is no career for a young man. It is a bad habit. His mother, my aunt Camille, the freed Nubian slave, wants him to go into dentistry. He likes the idea of it, the sharp and pointed instruments—mallets and pliers and scissors, the numbing oils, and especially the smooth enamel surfaces of teeth, waiting in the dark.
He thinks of teeth as he slips over rocks and other hard objects along the sea bottom. He thinks of himself as a small tongue in the great mouth of the sea.
And who will come to his funeral if he drowns this time? he muses. Surely not his mother, who has told him so a million and six times; not his father, who is so drunk he forgets he has two houses, four wives, and twenty sons, one of whom makes money by selling himself off, then pretending to drown while escaping.
Only his brothers will come to the funeral. They love him the best.
Sirine can’t sleep. She lies awake in her bed with the shining sleigh frame and the cool white covers. Strange things keep her awake: Aziz’s rhythmic poetry, the blurred faces from Nathan’s photographs, the dark chocolate of Han’s voice. She lets herself stray past the stage of sleep and even past the stage of remembering, and she wanders into the stage of soul-searching. Sometimes when she lies awake her body feels as finely made as a tuning fork. She can hear and smell the most delicate things, the smell and music of thought itself. A intricate breeze blows through the lacy curtains and sets them afloat, and bird cries rustle in the bushes. She listens to the evening sounds. If she lived in a colder place, she thinks, the sound outside her windows might be rain, but it’s only the sawing of palm leaves against each other in the breeze.
She is, somehow, thirty-nine and a half years old; her parents are dead; she has never married. The memories of all her past boyfriends are so faded, it is as if a magic page had lifted and the tracings of their faces disappeared. None of them managed to interest her in getting married, having children, or even moving away, which she’d somehow always assumed was the point of having a boyfriend. She remembers that one liked to study historical inventions. Another was an expert bridge player. They always loved her cooking—even the ones who’d never bitten into a falafel or scooped up hummus in pita bread before.
Sirine sometimes dates two men at once, and recently somehow there were three men calling her and coming by the house: her uncle’s blue-eyed mechanic, an intern at the university hospital, and a bustling chef at the German restaurant on Sepulveda who brought her tins full of fancy butter cookies. But ever since the start of school, she’s been too preoccupied with cooking to return their calls. She’s always had more men in her life than she’s known what to do with. Um-Nadia says that attraction is Sirine’s special talent—a sort of magnetism deeper in her cells than basic beauty or charm. She’s never broken up with anyone, she just loses track of them, adding new men as she goes. Never, not for a single day since her second year in high school, has she been without a boyfriend or admirer of some sort, and she has never really, entirely given herself to any of them. She knows this—it doesn’t seem a deliberate choice to her, it was simply something that never happened. She wonders sometimes if it’s a sort of flaw or lack in her—the inability to lose herself in someone else. Sirine has lived in her uncle’s calm library of a house nearly all her life; she’s never quite understood how people could trade in quiet spaces and solitary gardens and courtyards, thoughtful walks and the delicious rhythms of work, for the fearful tumult of falling into love.
Um-Nadia is helping to clean the smoked wheat kernels for a dinner special and singing a song in Arabic about a man who somehow misplaced his lover and who asks a shepherd if he’s seen her anywhere.
“I stayed up last night trying to remember things about my old boyfriends,” Sirine says to Um-Nadia’s daughter Mireille.
“Well, one of them was named Doug. One of your guys. If that helps,” Mireille says, watching her mother and Sirine sort kernels. “He was so cute, remember? He wore those striped coveralls.” Mireille refuses to prepare food, and only occasionally and grudgingly eats it. Mostly she leans in the kitchen doorframe blowing cigarette smoke out the back door. Now she sighs a plume of smoke and tips back her head; the morning light glows in her bleached hair.
Um-Nadia interrupts her song. “Yes, yes, yes,” she says. “Life is an insomnia. And who can keep track of such things as boyfriends?”
“You mean, like, life is an amnesia,” Mireille says.
Um-Nadia thinks about it a moment. “That too. But I meant insomnia first. Where you sit up at night trying to think of silly things like, where did I put my old husband, what happened to my blue pants, why does my hand hurt, and so on et cetera.” She edges a little closer to Sirine, watches her scraping chopped onion into a pan. “He’s here right now, you know,” she says, her voice low. “He’s right outside.”
“Who, Ma?” Mireille tries to look around her mother’s shoulder. “Who’s ‘he’ now?”
Sirine knows who. She can see his shadow through the wooden screen door, its shiny latch like a silver tooth.
“He’s a Muslim, you know.” Um-Nadia’s voice is half-warning and half-laughter. “Dark as an Egyptian.”
“Ma!” Mireille shouts. “Get a grip.”
Um-Nadia’s grinning like it’s one of her old jokes. “And here is our beautiful Sirine, whiter than this.” She takes a bite out of a whole peeled onion as if it were an apple. “Finally, a man for her to remember.”
Outside, there’s a new batch of Arab students coming to eat at Nadia’s Café again this year—new and regulars. Some of them are already sitting on the front steps before the café has officially opened, before their morning classes. They order the smallest, cheapest dishes: bean dip and garlic; bread and olives and thickened yogurt. Sometimes they bring their own food. Or they sit at the tables outside and play drums with their fingers, the one-stringed rebab, the violin, the flute, Arabic music sailing through the walls of the café so no one working inside can hear themselves think.
Um-Nadia waits until the air is roasted chocolaty, big and smoky with the scent of brewing coffee. Then she knocks the front door latch open. She holds the door wide and lets the older returning students, the immigrants and workingmen in, one by one, morning-shy, half-sleepy, hopeful from dreams, from a walk in the still-sweet air, not so lonesome this early in the day. Nothing a small cup of coffee and a plate of bread and olives can’t cure. She makes the younger students wait outside until the others have had their first cup of coffee.
Han and Nathan come in together. Han bows to Um-Nadia and kisses her hand. Um-Nadia’s smile deepens to dimples. Sirine watches the way she holds out the chair for him as if he were royalty. And now Sirine thinks he does look different from the rest of the customers. His hair falls in a black arc over his forehead. Sirine stands in the fr
ont kitchen and slides the morning pastry out of the oven, fragrant with brown spices, and layered with nuts and sugars and cheese. “Ah, you’ve made knaffea today,” Um-Nadia says as she streams past Sirine. “Who are we in love with, I wonder?” Then her dark, secret laugh.
Mireille perches on the stool next to Sirine, her legs jackknifed into her tight jeans, and peers behind Sirine at Han’s table. “Look at them,” she mutters. “Probably all waited on since the day they were born.”
Sirine glances up at the men. “Do you think?”
“All these guys really want is to get us back into veils, making babies, and I don’t know what, nursing goats or something. You watch out, I’m telling you.”
Sirine nods and sprinkles hot syrup over the pastry.
“They’re like animals—look at them! I swear, men are all half-animals and half-something else.”
Victor Hernandez comes in and slides two big canvas sacks of rice off his back onto the counter, then looks balefully at Mireille. “Are you talking bad about us?” he says.
Mireille shrugs and pooches out her scarlet lips, which is Arabic for no or maybe or I don’t know and I don’t care. She uses one of her long nails to curl her hair behind one ear.
“You know, we’re not all the same,” he says, resuming the conversation that they have every day.
“Oh, is that so, macho?”
“Yes.”
“Hm.”
Sirine hits her bell and waits for Mireille to pick up; when she doesn’t, Sirine comes out from behind the counter to bring Han the plate of knaffea herself. Mireille and Victor stop talking and Um-Nadia and the customers look up to see this break in precedent, even the two policemen sitting by the TV, eating fried lentils and onions, and watching reports in Arabic about terrorists from Saudi Arabia.
“Some knaffea, sir?” she says, and when Han looks at her the feeling of it stirs inside her like an ache in her neck and shoulders. She has an impulse to sit and feed him by hand.
“Oh, knaffea,” Nathan says longingly.
“And you were invited?” Han asks, laughing.
“Of course he’s invited,” Sirine says. “Everyone is always invited.” Nathan’s pale eyes swing over her, luminous and grateful, though he doesn’t move toward the food. Han’s laugh drifts across Sirine’s skin. She stares at the sugar container. Mireille bumps up beside her. “I’m the waitress,” she says to Nathan. “Don’t be harassing the chef. Anything you want, you ask me.”
Han turns toward Sirine as if he is trying to ask her something in that roomful of people. Her face goes damp and blood-warm, while in the background she can hear Nathan saying sweetly, wistfully, “I always loved knaffea,” as if it were now forbidden to him.
“The thing about knaffea,” Um-Nadia says, “it is said to be so delicious that it brings even the wild animals home.”
“What wild animals?” Mireille asks.
“Sure,” Han says. “All those stories about the animals—the jemel and asfoori and the ghazal—oh, what is that called in English again?”
“Oryx,” Nathan says promptly.
“Really? Oryx?” He looks at Nathan. “Well, the ghazal is always wandering, looking for his lost love, and they say he has to go away before he can find his way home again.”
“Ah-hunh, and now what does that mean?” Mireille clicks her nails along the counter.
“No, think about it,” Um-Nadia says and lifts one of her arched eyebrows. “It means things.”
“Plus I don’t see how knaffea enters into it.”
“Why do you always have to be against love?” Victor asks Mireille.
“I’m not against love! How is this about love?”
“Are you kidding? The whole thing’s about love,” says Um-Nadia. “Ask Sirine—she made the knaffea.”
They turn to look at her. Han smiles.
“Yuh,” Mireille says, “like Sirine knows about love.” Then she looks startled and glances at Sirine. “That didn’t come out right.”
Sirine backs up, hands wrapped in her apron. She shoves through the swinging door to the back kitchen.
Later, Mireille comes in and apologizes. She makes Sirine a pot of sweet tea and says that Sirine knows a great deal about love, much more than Mireille.
On the first Friday in September, they close the café early, Um-Nadia hanging a sign on the café window that says: “All gone to Lon’s.”
Lon Hayden—who throws this party every fall—used to be a movie actor and played cowhands in a string of small-time Westerns, and then he changed his mind and got a degree in Middle Eastern theater and became the Near Eastern Studies Department chairman. His wife is a casting director for big action movies and makes enough money for them to own a grand house with a grove of bearded palm trees with silver-scaly prehistoric trunks. Lon comes to the café once a week for lamb shank braised in olive oil and garlic.
Sirine’s uncle picks her up at work and they drive through Westwood, into the lush compound of Beverly Hills. The air is alive with drifting pollens and the scent of fine, rare rains lifting from the ocean. Lon’s house is a low, sprawling arrangement, set back on acres of velvet green lawn behind an electric gate tricked out with surveillance cameras. Sirine’s uncle waves at the camera and then jumps when the disembodied voice says, “Come on in.” The gate swings open. “Americans,” he sighs. They roll along the winding drive until they approach a small army of young men in white uniforms; one trots up to them and says, “Valet park,” and Sirine’s uncle gets nervous and drops the keys in the grass.
There are movie people and university people and Nadia’s Café people milling around in little groups, holding tall glasses. Um-Nadia is wearing her wraparound dress and what she calls her ruby slippers; her black hair is piled high on top of her head. She stands with one hand on her waist, her hip hitched up like a question mark. She waves at Sirine and winks at her uncle, smiling her slow smile, eyes half-closed, lined in electric-blue. Then she lifts her chin and says, “I’ve got to go talk to people.” Mireille is also there, in silvery workout clothes and silver heels, and Victor Hernandez stands beside her with his square jaw and distant gaze, holding both their drinks and a plate of deviled eggs.
The house and its grounds are so vast, partygoers seem to appear out of nowhere, strolling around bends in the lawn; there are murmuring, secluded groups of people lounging in bent twig chairs. The beautiful centerpiece of the grounds is the spotlit pool, which looks like a series of five or six loosely connected lagoons landscaped with fronds and bubbling falls and rock steps. Her uncle mentions that most of Foreign Languages and Near Eastern Studies had been invited—Sirine surreptitiously looks around for Han—but the sun has gone beneath the horizon so everyone is partially hidden now and it’s hard to make out faces clearly.
She sits on the edge of a cluster of movie people slouched in lawn chairs who are comparing the foods they’re allergic to—wheat, dairy, corn, nuts, coffee, chocolate, yeast, wine, onions, eggs—which turns into a conversation about different diets they’ve tried—Blood Type, Scarsdale, Grapefruit, D.N.A.—which turns into a conversation about their favorite Chinese herbs, aromatherapies, tinctures, and vitamin supplements. The chatter bores Sirine into a buzzing, pleasant sort of trance. She watches Lon and his three teenage sons carry a battered stereo turntable and walnut-stained amplifiers out of the house, dragging what looks like a two-thousand-foot extension cord behind them. “Lon, no!” his wife cries out, her hands going to her hips.
“I remember when he bought that stereo back in college,” one of the actors says, a man who played Lon’s sidekick in the cowboy movies. “He still likes to haul it out at parties.” Lon’s amiable, unembarrassable sons set up the stereo. It looks a bit sad and dilapidated on the velvety lawn, but then one of the sons fits a record onto the turntable, carefully positions the arm, and Middle Eastern violins and flutes swirl and swoosh through the air. “Un-oh,” says one of the actresses. “Headache music.”
The sidekick smiles.
“Simon Shaheen plays Mohammed Abdul Wahab—I know Lon’s favorites.”
Sirine sees Um-Nadia put down her drink, grab the Russian Studies professor, Zinovy Basilevich, and start propelling him around the pool in a shimmying, complicated dance. The big, ginger-mustached professor looks frightened and happy. They pass several groups of people, then one person looks up as they pass: it’s Han.
Han doesn’t seem to have noticed Sirine. He’s standing on the far end of one of the pool-lagoons lit by rose-colored spotlights, dressed in a way that seems deliberately American: loose tan shorts, sandals, a fluid yellow shirt. The party has gotten crowded and there’s a press of people all around him—she thinks there is something about him that makes people want to stand close. He smiles as people approach and inclines slightly toward everyone who talks to him, as if he were intrigued, a little bit in love with each of them.
She moves toward a small grove of potted palms near the drinks table, heart thumping as if she were being chased. Some graduate students approach Han but he keeps looking around. He walks along the side of the pool, scanning the party, students trailing. The surface of the pool looks waxy, the water bending and flexing. It throws reflections over Han’s face and the palm fronds blur before Sirine’s eyes. Her throat feels tight, the ground wavy beneath her feet. “Stay away from him,” she murmurs to herself.
“Absolutely,” Mireille says in her right ear. Sirine jumps. “Look at that—he’s so in love with himself he should get a room!”
Sirine glances at her but Mireille is looking in the other direction, halfway up the sloping lawn, where Aziz is sprawled in a lounge chair. Sirine can see the rounded rise of his stomach in a pale silk shirt, his outstretched legs crossed at the ankles, his expression smooth and mild, and his eyes shadowed with thick straight lashes. He’s flanked by female students, each of them watching him with adoring faces. He holds one hand up in the air, turns it this way and that, as if he were examining a delicate vase, and all the students watch as if they too could see the vase.
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