Sirine butters it, then pours a thick filling of ground walnuts, sugar, and spices over the layers. She strokes her palm over the top to level it. “My mother too,” she murmurs. “Well, it was usually just her and me. She talked to me while we worked. Told me stuff.”
Han glances at her. “Like what sort of stuff?”
She smiles and shrugs, a little shy. “Oh, silly things, like whether you pour hot syrup over cold baklava or cold syrup over hot.”
“That’s quite serious, that’s metaphysical.”
She considers this, surprised by the memories that start to come to her—the way her mother’s small lessons felt like larger secrets when Sirine was a girl: how instructions in the fine dicing of walnuts and the way to clarify butter were also meditations on hope and devotion. “Yes,” she says, a soft, dawning recognition in her voice. “I think so too.”
“Oh, definitely. My mother told me that if I knew how to make good baklava I would be irresistible to any woman,” he says.
“Ah, so she taught you how to make baklava,” Sirine observes.
“No. So she refused to teach me.”
Sirine laughs. “But somehow you learned how to make it anyway. Lucky for me.”
“Actually, I’m learning how right this second.”
Another layer. Butter. She glances at him, then back at the baklava. “You miss it?”
He looks up. “I miss…? The kitchen? My home?” He accidentally tears a corner of a sheet of dough—it’s starting to get dry. “‘I miss my mother’s coffee / I miss my mother’s bread.’”
Sirine raises her eyebrows.
“It’s a poem. Not mine.” He grimaces, trying to reattach the dough. “No, I miss everything, Sirine. Absolutely everything.”
“Tell me something you miss,” Sirine says, stroking the butter over the dough. “I mean, specifically.”
“Mm, specifically.” He peels another pastry sheet. “All right. Here’s one—we had a well on our property. It was lined with big, crackling palm trees all around. All the Bedouin used to use it. I would stand in line with them holding two big metal pails and they would bring up the water using an old-fashioned crank and spill the fresh water from the bucket into my pails. And I would drink a cup of the water as soon as it spilled out of the earth—it was so cold it would make my ears ring. And it tasted like—I don’t know, it was so good—it tasted like rocks and wind and pure…pure coldness.”
Sirine patches the cracking layer with more butter. She can just about taste the cold sweetness of that water—as if she had tasted it before and knows how good it is—and she feels a wild rush of desire to drink some right there and then. “I can imagine it,” she says. “I can imagine just how that would taste.”
He carefully lays another pastry sheet down, tugging on the ends to straighten the wrinkles. “There was an old Bedouin who guarded the well for us. He was thin-boned, with glossy hair and liquid eyes—like so many of the desert Bedu—part hawk and part man. His name was Abu-Najmeh, he had a little yellow dog we called Zibdeh, and Abu-Najmeh used to sleep sitting up beside the well with his rifle in his arms and his dog at his feet.” Han smiles. “I haven’t thought of him in years. He would aim at anyone who he thought was trying to steal the water. Including me and my sister. But he didn’t shoot too often. He used to say, ‘There is no greater gold than water, thanks be to Allah.’”
Sirine smiles. She patches another cracked layer, dabbing at it with her pastry brush.
“Once, when he was walking through town, he found two children’s bicycles in the trash heap behind one of the big hotels. Just thrown away. Maybe some diplomat got them for his kids while they were visiting and didn’t want to bother shipping them home when they returned. Anyway, Abu-Najmeh, who had never even seen or heard of a bicycle in his entire life, somehow took one look at those things and understood exactly the principle behind them. He gave one to me and one to my friend Sami and helped us learn how to ride by running alongside the bikes. Sixty-six years old, his sword bouncing in his belt, his rifle on his back, his head scarf flying, and a handlebar in each hand.”
Sirine laughs and pulls a pastry sheet off center, tearing it. She tries to pull it back into place, bites her lower lip. “Do you think you’ll go back?”
His back stiffens. “I can’t go back,” he says. “To Iraq? No.”
She tilts the bowl of butter. “Why not?”
“Not the way things are now, of course. It’s very dangerous—it was terribly difficult for me to get out of the country in the first place.” He tries to patch the last broken layer of dough together. “But even so, it’s like there’s some part of me that can’t quite grasp the thought of never returning. I have to keep reminding myself. It’s so hard to imagine. So I just tell myself: not yet.”
“How terrible,” she says. What Han says reminds her of a sense that she’s had—about both knowing and not-knowing something. She often has the feeling of missing something and not quite understanding what it is that she’s missing. At the same time, she’s not sure what Han means about the dangers or why it was so difficult to leave—but she also feels embarrassed to ask him and reveal her ignorance. She doesn’t follow the news and now she feels ashamed that she’s taken so little interest in her father’s home country. Distracted, she lowers the brush and accidentally swipes his fingers with butter. She blushes and quickly wipes his hand off with her apron. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says.
His hand is warm and his fingers fumble through hers. “You may butter my fingers anytime,” he says, then coughs and looks abashed. The kitchen door swings open and Um-Nadia walks in. She stops in her tracks when she sees them, her eyes wide, the mascaraed lashes like spikes, a brilliant smile opening on her face.
After Han leaves, Sirine goes out to the front kitchen. She is prepping for the lunch rush when Victor pushes through the door from the back kitchen with his mop.
“Hi, Chef,” he says and swipes the mop around for a few minutes. Then he says: “So—making baklava with Han?”
She lowers her spoon, looks at him. “Nosy.”
He grins, head down toward the mopping.
“By the way,” he says, mopping around her, “I like your rose.”
She frowns then looks into the back kitchen and notices a slip of paper partially tucked beneath the cutting board. University stationery. In one corner there’s a funny little drawing of an arcing, winged fish, and beneath this, a phone number and an address. She unfolds it. “Sirine. I am a very bad cook. But I am a good student. Would you be willing to join me for a dinner tomorrow night? Very truly yours, Hanif.” Beside the note is a radish carved into the shape of a blossom.
CHAPTER SIX
Sirine comes downstairs late in the evening and finds her uncle eating a big plate of leftover falafels. “Do you know how much fat is in that?” she says. “What about some nice yogurt labneh and cucumbers?”
Her uncle looks at her thoughtfully and puts down half a falafel. “So we are on chapter…what, now? Three? Seven?”
She sighs.
“And are there any more cookies left?”
Once they are clear of the other boats, the Covered Man sets the sails and they billow with the blue winds. In the twinkling of an eye, it seems, they are at the heart of the Red Sea. Abdelrahman hears the summons of the seahorses, the longing manta rays, the cry of mermaids, mermen. The whole mer-world chants: Abdelrahman Salahadin! Where are you?
Invoking his willpower, he shuts his eyes, then stands. But he begins to tremble and he sits down. He has waited too long, he thinks, the sea will drag him away. But then again, what will happen if he stays with this jinn? He stands again but his trembling gets worse, so again he sits.
He does this up and down for a while as the water gets choppier and the boat seems to get smaller. It just so happens that he’s up when the Covered Man sits back and pours them both cups of coffee. Then he begins to speak.
“I am from the Beni-Sakr Tribe. You can tell from the style of m
y wrappings that I am from a desert people. What you may not know is that the Bedouins were once water people, that where there are dunes there were once sapphire waves.”
“So that is why you are such an expert sailor!” Abdelrahman marvels, eyeing the long intricate white wrappings that cover the man’s head and face and the red sash at his middle. Then Abdelrahman notices he’s standing and quickly sits.
The Covered Man sighs again as if wondering if it is possible for any one creature to truly understand another. He says, “No, unfortunately neither I nor any of my tribesmen remember the sea. It’s a forgotten language. But this story begins with the sea, not long after the day of my sixteenth birthday, when I married my second cousin. Some say the point of marriage is the consolidation of wealth and family. But it meant much more to us. I felt when we wed that our souls recognized each other—possibly from previous lives—and clung to each other. After our wedding, we were inseparable.”
“But something happened, right?” says Abdelrahman Salahadin. He looks around anxiously at the ominous swells and stands.
The Covered Man seems to smile. “I see you are familiar with the shape of stories! Something must always happen, isn’t that so? It can’t simply be: and they lived happily together and so on…. So be it, something did happen: my mate and I journeyed along the great trade routes of the desert bartering embroidery, spices, and animals in each of the cities we visited. We were in a caravan traveling to the tiny city of Jiddah, tucked on to the shores of the Arabian Gulf. This would have been the farthest any of us had traveled from the belly of the desert; it would be the first time that any of us would see the ocean, and we speculated as to what it might look like. Some said it rolled like a thousand-thousand stones across a low embankment, others that it flowed like melted glass.
“It took three weeks to travel from the Great Desert to the ocean. As we approached, the sand gave rise to a variety of corkscrew plants, camel briars, rasping thistles, and twirling ferns. I paid little attention—I was waiting to see the water. I smelled it first, a high, purifying scent. Then I heard it, a murmur which gradually increased till it was a roar. I covered my ears and looked up and saw clouds bright as satin, then looked down and my eyes were filled with the flaming, churning sea. I instinctively sought out the hand of my beloved but to my shock no one was there. Then I saw someone running down the embankment.”
“This was…?” Abdelrahman is impatient, sensitive to the sway of water all around them.
The Covered Man nods. “Of course, my only beloved. The one who, over the course of five years, had become eyebeam to my eye, essential to me as salt and air. And my Rarity, my Rose, my Diamond of Diamonds, was running into the vast blue embrace.”
That evening when she returns from work, Sirine can hear King Babar whining and crying even before she has the door open. She bends to him and he jumps into her arms and leans against her chest, his nose buried in her hair. The only nights Sirine eats at home—Sunday and Monday when the restaurant is closed—King Babar sits on her lap through the meal. He snoozes, only half-waking to nibble the morsels that she transports to him under the table, and drifts in a sweet dream of love, eating, and forgetting. The rest of the week she eats at work, and goes to bed almost as soon as she gets in for an early start the next day.
Tonight should be an early night according to King Babar’s internal clock, but Sirine is putting on new clothes, a green vapor of a dress for the warm evening. King Babar follows her to the front door, staring, his eyes rolled up at her face. She kisses him goodbye, feeling the faintest pang for leaving him behind.
She checks the address that Han gave her and realizes that his apartment is also in West L.A., practically within walking distance. She wheels her fendered three-speed bike out of the front entrance, hikes up her skirt, tucks it in around her legs, and pushes off.
Sirine rolls up the quiet street through a ripple of streetlights. Han lives in a complex that blurs into all the other complexes along the street; they have names like the Del Mar, the Vista, the Casa Lupita, rows of balconies, panels of glass, side-swept with date palms and bougainvillea and banana trees. The street looks shimmery in the moonlight, ephemeral as a mirage. Sirine stands outside his building, the Cyprus Gardens, checks the number written on her hand. She imagines for a moment that if she closes her eyes the neighborhoods will disappear—that’s what her uncle says about L.A.: close your eyes and it will vanish.
The intercom in his building lobby is broken, the front door propped open with a flat, speckled rock. It’s an older building constructed around a courtyard with a dreamy musky scent of decaying roses, jasmine, and dust. She enters the elevator and its doors rattle shut; it ascends with a myriad of watery sighs and shivers. The elevator groans and shudders its way to the top, fifth floor. Sirine stands outside his door for a moment, inhales through her nose. Number 503. She lifts her fist and accidentally knocks too loudly.
Han immediately opens the door as if he’d been waiting right behind it. He takes her hand and the touch travels all the way to her spine. She’s so nervous, her senses all sharpened, she can only take in one detail at a time: the painted edge of the doorframe as he draws her in; stacks and stacks of books piled on their sides; a blue cloth spread out on the floor; the air swirling with the smell of cooking. For some reason the word Africa comes into her head. She glances at Han again: he is freshly shaved, his hair polished back with a brush, strands of hair falling forward over his brow: he swipes at it now, absently, with one hand. He looks as if he can’t quite believe she’s standing there. The apartment smells of thyme and sumac and something with a rich, pearly sweetness. He seems different in this glazed atmosphere, his face softer, as if all his emotions have drifted to the surface of his body, so she can feel all of him in the touch of his hand. He takes a half-step closer and the yellow light flickers.
He says something, his voice so low she has to incline her head to hear. “You are…you look…”
The blue cloth on the floor is a pulse of color: it flashes behind her eyes and fills her head and for a moment the feeling—an intense, atom-gathering desire—is the same as this sea-blue color at their feet.
She smiles.
“…beautiful,” he says.
Then he asks something else, but she is looking around, briefly distracted, and has to step back a little from him in order to hear him. He’s asking if he can get her a drink; she barely nods. The picture window appears to be full of stars. She’s looking and looking. A sound vague as bees or distant bells hums between the black spaces in the sky, then she realizes it’s coming from the corners of the room: a woman singing. Han goes out and then comes back with round goblets of crimson wine.
“How lovely,” Sirine says. “What a lovely voice she has.”
“It’s Fairuz,” Han says. “I was going to play some American music for you but I guess I don’t actually own any. I meant for tonight to be all-American for you.”
“But I’m not really all-American,” Sirine says.
“Well, then I hope you will tell me what you are,” Han says.
Sirine follows him into the kitchen, where a damp wisp is curling out of the top of the stove. She admires the square shape and fit of his hands on the oven door. She inhales and realizes what she’s smelling. “Oh! You made meat loaf?”
He slides it out, a sleeve of meat. “Just like mom used to make?”
Broccoli branches, mashed potatoes, spools of gravy, sliced pillowy white bread. It slides on to Sirine’s plate, glossy with butter. The meat loaf is oniony and dense under its charred crust, dressed in sweet puddles of ketchup. On the counter there’s a food-stained copy of The Joy of Cooking and a red-plaid Betty Crocker cookbook, both from the library. She’s impressed. No one ever wants to cook for her; the rare home-dinners at friends’ houses are served with anxiety and apologies. But Han just seems excited—his skin slightly damp and pink from the kitchen heat—and intrigued by the new kind of cooking, a shift of ingredients like a move from
native tongue into a foreign language: butter instead of olive oil; potatoes instead of rice; beef instead of lamb. He seats her on a pillow on the blue cloth and then sets the dishes before her on the cloth. He sits across from her, one knee skimming hers. They touch and she makes herself lean forward to reach the bowl of potatoes. Their knees graze again.
Han tastes each dish while looking at Sirine, so the meal seems like a question. She nods and praises him lavishly. “Mm, the rich texture of this meat loaf—the egg and breadcrumbs—and these bits of onion are so good, and there’s a little chili powder and dry mustard, isn’t there? It’s lovely. And there’s something in the sauce…something…”
“You mean ketchup?” Han asks.
“Oh yes, I suppose that’s it.” She smiles.
“That’s remarkable.”
Sirine smiles vaguely, tips her head, not sure of what he means. “What?”
“The way you taste things….” He gestures over the food, picks up a bite of meat loaf in his fingers as if it were an olive. “You know what everything here is—I mean exactly.”
“Oh no.” She laughs. “It’s so basic, anyone can do that. It’s like you just taste the starting places—where it all came from. Unless of course it’s ketchup.”
He gazes at her, then carefully takes her hand and kisses her fingers. “Then I think you must be of this place.”
Sirine laughs again, disconcerted by his intensity. “Well, I don’t know about that, but I think food should taste like where it came from. I mean good food especially. You can sort of trace it back. You know, so the best butter tastes a little like pastures and flowers, that sort of stuff. Things show their origins.”
“That must be why you seem so American to me,” he says shyly and glances down into his wineglass.
She doesn’t completely understand what he means by this, but then it doesn’t seem to matter that much. The night clouds ripple past the balcony doors like fish tails. The air smells like desert salt. She finishes her glass of wine and he pours her more. The soft evasion in his eyes draws her in. It’s as if he isn’t entirely in the room: his gaze subtly refocusing between her face and a hidden, internal place. His eyes reflect both the kitchen lights and the night clouds. Sirine leans closer, her skin warm. She’s disoriented by his scent and proximity. “So…” She casts around a bit. “So, you don’t actually have any furniture, I see. That’s sort of unusual.”
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