On Saturday morning Sirine feels exhausted; her throat and lips burn as if she’s been eating raw sugar. Mireille and Um-Nadia and Victor Hernandez and Cristobal the cleaning man and the early-breakfast students feel it too. Several of them look like they’ve walked straight from last night’s party to work. The police officers are cradling their heads in their hands. Um-Nadia’s hair is still up in her frothy bun and her blue eye shadow has drifted above her eyebrows. “Now, there was a party,” she says. “I love lime rickeys.”
The door jingles and Han’s student Nathan appears. Um-Nadia turns slowly, holding her temples, to see who’s come in. “The American’s here,” she says.
Nathan comes to the counter and sits across from where Sirine is working. He pushes the napkin to one side and puts his camera on the counter. His skin looks a bit raw, hard-scrubbed. The disks of his eyes are a lush bluish gray, and when he looks at her, Sirine feels something there heavy as velvet curtains, something that he holds back with one arm.
“You can have tea,” Um-Nadia says to Nathan, putting down a steaming glass with a spoon in it. “Perhaps someone will eventually make coffee.”
“Um-Nadia,” Nathan says. He frowns slightly and looks her hair and face over. “You look different today.”
She lifts her chin and pats carefully at her bun. “I’m a believer in being different. It makes you younger and younger.”
Mireille comes out with a plate of hummus and bread. “Very soon you will be ageless,” she says.
Um-Nadia raises her eyebrows. “She thinks I don’t know what that means. But I know what everything means!” She takes the hummus from Mireille and puts it in front of Nathan. “Eat,” she says. “You look like an Ethiopian.” Then she sits beside the police officers to watch her Bedouin soap opera and pointedly turns her back to Nathan.
“I don’t think that’s p.c.,” one of the officers says to her.
“What isn’t?” Um-Nadia says. “Ethiopians?”
Nathan moves the plate a quarter-turn. The caps of his shoulders are peaked and bony and look a bit like wings when he raises them. Sirine brings him some fresh pita bread. “Watch the steam when you tear it,” she says.
“Thank you for the knaffea—you know—the other day,” he murmurs.
“I didn’t think you ate any of it.”
“I don’t really like food much,” he says, eyes lowered.
“Mm.” She goes behind the counter, then leans over it and pours a little olive oil from a small jug over the top of the hummus; the oil is velvety and green. “Try it like this,” she says.
But he shakes his head mournfully. He’s so thin everything about him seems pinched and crimped. “Has Han come in yet?”
She wipes her hands on her apron. “Was he going to come by?”
He smiles and raises one eyebrow. She quickly turns away, busying herself with wiping. “What?” he asks. “What’d I say?”
“Just the way you’re looking at me.”
“Looking?”
Sirine stares at her towel. “I don’t know. Like you’re taking a picture.”
Nathan laughs. He picks up his hot tea, then puts it back down. “I can’t help it—when I see a wonderful subject.”
She touches her hair, tied back for work in a messy braid. Then she tucks in her towel and starts to look for a pan. “I look terrible in pictures.”
“Not at all. You’d photograph beautifully.” He tilts his head and turns one hand in the air. “There’s something about you that stops the eye. It’s a rare quality. People look at you and forget about things.” He looks down, face red.
“Is that good?” She unhooks one of the pans from the ceiling rack and slides it onto the range. A crazy-quilt pattern of light slides over the walls, reflected from the glass door, customers coming in and out. “That doesn’t necessarily sound good,” she says.
“Who cares about good? Good is like nice, pleasant, normal.” He frowns. “But it’s not just that, it’s more than the way you look. Good is…blah. You’re this—other thing—all complicated.”
“I’m boring.”
“You’re not,” he says firmly.
She looks at him. She has the strangest feeling—like a tickling of déjà vu or a premonition—that he wants to tell her something. She looks away from him and starts scraping chopped tomatoes into the pan with a wooden spoon. “To be honest, sometimes I think no one can see me at all.”
The door jingles again, more tiny stars thrown through the room. Nathan sits up. “Maybe I should be getting to class.” Some other students come in and Nathan looks them over, then settles back down. He stirs a stream of sugar from the container into his coffee. “I registered late for school and Han’s class was already full when I showed up, but I talked my way in. Now he says he counts on me being there to say interesting things in class.” He smirks and says, “I’m not sure how he meant that.”
Sirine pushes back more wisps of hair. “I bet you’re a great student.”
Nathan glances at her. “No. Han’s a great professor. I’ve never studied with anyone like him before. The kind of teacher you always hope you’ll find but doesn’t actually exist. Only he does, there he is. You get the feeling when you listen to his lectures that he’s taking you apart, piece by piece. All the things you thought you knew have to be relearned. You find out you have to learn a new way of knowing things. You listen with your whole body, not just your head, and you see that he teaches the same way, with his whole being. He teaches Islamic history and Arabic literature but he also teaches about life and art and faith and love…. I mean, if you know how to listen for it.”
“Which I’m sure you do.”
“Of course, I’ve got an advantage—I’m a little older than the others and I’ve been out of school for a while, working—out in the world.”
“Really?”
He leans forward on his elbows. “You know, I moved here specially to study with him, when I heard he was coming to teach here. I don’t know why he lets me hang around him—I think he feels sorry for me.”
“Oh, no.” She knocks her spoon clean on the side of the pan and puts it down, leans her forearms on the counter. “That doesn’t seem like Han’s style. He probably just likes you.”
Nathan drops his head as if he can’t quite meet her expression, rubs the heel of his palm over his eyes, smiles as if laughing at himself. “Hard to imagine.”
“So you knew all about his work, then? Is he also famous like Aziz?”
“Aziz!” He waves the thought away. “No, it’s just—I’ve been following Han’s career for some time now. I look for his work in the scholarly journals, his articles on Arabic literature and translation, all that sort of thing. I’ve got a personal interest.”
“Personal how?”
He tears off a little piece of bread, holds it just over the hummus without actually dipping it in. “We’ve known people in common.” He looks down at the hummus then and shrugs. And besides—I mean, apart from the personal stuff—I just think he’s brilliant.”
A restaurant reviewer for the L.A. Times once described Sirine’s cooking as brilliant; she remembers the suffused glow of satisfaction she felt, looking at that single word. “Do you think he’s some kind of genius or something?”
“Oh, well—a genius? That’s a funny word. Maybe a sort of genius.” Nathan swirls his glass of tea. “I guess I have a few ideas about him.”
“Han?” She feels both intrigued and nervous, not quite sure she wants to hear these things. She starts splitting open heads of garlic and picking at the papery skin covering the cloves. “How about—tell me something about yourself instead?”
He opens his mouth, then says, “Oh. Really, I’d rather not do that.” He slides a cigarette out of a packet and plays with it nervously, puts it in his mouth unlit—Um-Nadia allows smoking only between three and six-thirty in the afternoon. “I’m mean, there’s just nothing interesting to tell about me.”
“What do you mean?” She peels ano
ther clove. “You’re a photographer and everything. You’re very interesting.”
“No, really, I’m not anything. An overgrown student in search of a life, maybe.”
She laughs, a soft exhalation. She shakes her head and flattens the cloves under the side of her knife.
“I used to be…better, let’s say. A long time ago. But now—sometimes it’s like I can hardly sit in this chair, I can hardly walk on the ground. I’m made out of powder….” He looks at her quickly, as if frightened of what he’d just let slip. “Damn. Does everyone do this? Come right up to you and start saying unbelievably weird things?”
She laughs again and says, “Oh, now…” But it’s true. She’s used to men’s attentions, their desire to impress her or just keep her listening—a quiet, captive audience behind a counter and a chopping block.
“Anyway—I take comfort thinking it’s not just me,” he says. “Lots of people are like that.” He puts the cigarette in his mouth, takes it back out. “Like powder. Just sort of…” He waves one hand around. “I can see right through some people. There’s so little there. That’s why my photography is what it is. I’ve got this kind of X-ray vision. And then there’s people like you and Han. There’s more to you. Layers, surprises. And Han, well…” He trails off.
“What?”
“No.” He laughs.
She looks at him sideways, wondering what he’s thinking. She bites her top lip a little.
“Well…” He lowers his voice confidentially and leans forward. “Okay. Have you heard of oryxes?” He takes out a plastic lighter and lights his cigarette. His hands are stained and a little shaky. “Black and white, with long, straight, spiral-carved horns. They’re supposed to be something like the inspiration for unicorns. I don’t know if that’s true, that’s just something I heard. And somehow, when I met Han that was the first thing I thought of—the oryx. I don’t know why—I don’t think they even live in Iraq. Some people say they’re gazelles or antelopes, but they’re really a different species, larger and rougher. Gorgeous. And they’ve been just about hunted away to nothing. They’re different from all the other animals. At one point I really wanted to photograph them but I never got the chance.” He looks at her so closely she feels he is drawing something hidden right up out of her skin. “I always wanted to see one, just to know they existed. I always thought, if I could get a photo of an oryx, I’d have some kind of proof.”
Sirine says, “Proof of what?”
He grins, blowing out smoke, and shrugs and says, “I’m not sure yet. Just proof!”
Just then the door to the back kitchen swings open and Um-Nadia comes out and snicks the cigarette from Nathan’s hands like swatting a fly. She shakes a finger at him and says, “No smoking till three o’clock!”
When he packs up his books and leaves in a huff, Sirine looks down at the plate of hummus—all the oil looks like it’s been licked from the top.
CHAPTER FIVE
Bear in mind, of course, that this is a form of love story in disguise. And who does love stories better than the Bedu anyway? Remember that Bedouin love poem in which the Bedouin is so in love that he says that his he-camel is in love with her she-camel? A classic.
The latest purchaser of Abdelrahman Salahadin—the Covered Man—moves with the charm of birdsong; Abdelrahman watches his slight gestures as they walk together through the crowded souk and he becomes entangled in his own thoughts and snaggled in his emotions. He suspects the man is a jinn of some sort, come to steal him from the water—which is exactly what his mother always told him would happen. He believes that this man has looped a bit of the thread-leash through a corner of his soul.
The streets of Aqaba are shell spirals and, on summer nights, crowded and complicated as a woman’s heart. Boys sit on the curbs and wonder about love, women run their hands through their hair, locks dense with sea salt, men unfurl velvet prayer rugs, hands on their knees, they bow, rise, rock into the sea-waves of prayer.
The Covered Man leads Abdelrahman Salahadin to a new harbor at the end of the busiest street, sand-frayed and tangled in reeds, shell, and glass. The complicated waves wind and unwind, surf breaking into backwash, an endless dispute. The Covered Man leads Abdelrahman toward a boat in the harbor, an ancient felucca like the Portuguese used to sail, with an elongated, swannish neck and tapering sides curved like lips. It rocks boldly among the other boats, which creak and thump against its sides. They must leap from deck to deck in order to reach the felucca; it tilts as Abdelrahman steps aboard, then as he shifts it rights itself primly.
For the first time in his life, Abdelrahman looks for the oars, to conduct himself as a proper slave should. But the Covered Man says, no, please sit. He takes up the sweep oar in the aft of the boat and, snapping the gold thread which binds them together, they set off.
Nadia’s Café is set in an old converted house with three main rooms: the small front dining area crowded with too many tables and a row of swivel seats along a chrome-lined counter; behind the counter, where there’s a silver-hooded grill and a workstation with a counter to chop at and a window over the sink; and, through a swinging door, the back kitchen, full of shelves, cupboards, a giant refrigerator, and a linoleum-topped table with wobbly pipe-metal legs and five vinyl-cracked chairs. The walls in the front of the café are covered with strips of yellowing newspaper reviews that say things like, “Aladdin’s hidden treasure!” and “The Middle East in Westwood.” And there is even a framed and signed glossy photograph of Casey Kasem, who once stopped by the café to eat and proclaimed that they made the best mjeddrah in town.
The back kitchen is Sirine’s retreat, her favorite place to sit at a table chopping carrots and thinking her thoughts. She can look out the window at the back courtyard and feel like she’s a child again, working at her mother’s table. Mondays are for baklava, which she learned to make by watching her parents. Her mother said that a baklava-maker should have sensitive, supple hands, so she was in charge of opening and unpeeling the paper-thin layers of dough and placing them in a stack in the tray. Her father was in charge of pastry-brushing each layer of dough with a coat of drawn butter. It was systematic yet graceful: her mother carefully unpeeling each layer and placing them in the tray where Sirine’s father painted them. It was important to move quickly so that the unbuttered layers didn’t dry out and start to fall apart. This was one of the ways that Sirine learned how her parents loved each other—their concerted movements like a dance; they swam together through the round arcs of her mother’s arms and her father’s tender strokes. Sirine was proud when they let her paint a layer, prouder when she was able to pick up one of the translucent sheets and transport it to the tray—light as raw silk, fragile as a veil.
On Tuesday morning, however, Sirine has overslept. She’s late to work and won’t have enough time to finish preparing the baklava before starting breakfast. She could skip a day of the desserts and serve the customers ice cream and figs or coconut cookies and butter cake from the Iranian Shusha Bakery two doors down. But the baklava is important—it cheers the students up. They close their eyes when they bite into its crackling layers, all lightness and scent of orange blossoms.
And Sirine feels unsettled when she tries to begin breakfast without preparing the baklava first; she can’t find her place in things. So finally she shoves the breakfast ingredients aside and pulls out the baklava tray with no idea of how she’ll find the time to finish it, just thinking: sugar, cinnamon, chopped walnuts, clarified butter, filo dough…. She’s working in the greenish morning light, concentrating so she doesn’t notice the tapping at the back door, doesn’t even hear it until the door cracks open, a voice saying, “Sirine?”
There’s a mist of dust and flour in the light from the open doorway and someone is standing there, backlit. “Oh!” Sirine straightens up.
“Is this okay? I took a chance that you’d be here early,” he says, stepping in. And the light softens and turns and she sees it’s Han. “I just thought I’d—I mean�
��I just wanted to say hi.” He looks at the counter piled up with filo dough. “I’m sorry. I’ve barged in at a bad time, haven’t I?”
Sirine is looking at his fingers. Remembers the brush of them underwater.
“What?”
She smiles.
There’s time for baklava if they make it together.
She hunts in the big drawer for another apron, shows him where to stand, how to pick up the sheet of filo dough from its edge, the careful, precise unpeeling, the quick movement from the folded sheets to the tray, and finally, the positioning on top of the tray. He watches everything closely, asks no questions, and then aligns the next pastry sheet perfectly. She paints the dough with clarified butter. And while Sirine has never known how to dance, always stiffening and trying to lead while her partner murmurs relax, relax—and while there are very few people who know how to cook and move with her in the kitchen—it seems that she and Han know how to make baklava together. She’s startled to find that she seems to feel his presence in her shoulders, running through her arms and wrists, into her hands. Her senses feel bunched together like fingers around a bouquet, her skin sensitive to the touch. She feels light-headed. She watches the fluid movement in his legs, arms, and neck, the dark fringe of his eyes. He transports the sheets and she sweeps the pastry brush, losing herself in the rocking movement. She takes in the powerful curve of his neck and shoulders; his skin is silkily brown. There’s just a touch of insomnia in his eyes, an inward, solitary air.
He says, “This reminds me.”
“It reminds you? Of what?”
He nods. “The kitchen. I never much wanted to be up in my father’s orchard. I liked this. I liked the kitchen. The table. Stove. Where the women were always telling stories. My mother and my aunts and the neighbors and—my sister.” He smoothes another sheet.
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