I blink out of my towel cave at this astounding new place around us, then touch my mother’s ribs through her cotton shirt. “Mom, how long do you have to be best friends with someone if you’re best friends?”
She flitters at my bangs; they’re stiff with salt. “Well, honey, I don’t think there’re any rules about that. I guess you can be best friends your whole life if you’re lucky.”
“Are you and Dad best friends?”
It’s hard to make out her expression under the cherry lights along the shore. She appears to be thinking about it, staring out to where Bud is still drifting around, piping and tootling like a tugboat.
“You have to do whatever your best friend says, right?”
Now I can see her face—a little amused and wary. “Why do you say that?”
“Dad said to come to Jordan, right?”
There is even less sound now than before, if that is possible, just a slight slip of waves on the shore, a sighing wash like the sound of someone saying “Hush, hush” or the papery rustle of the palm fronds arching over the sand. “Your father . . . needed us to come here, he needed to see—what it felt like.”
Now we seem to be whispering.
“What does it feel like?” I ask quietly, not quite knowing what I’m asking, just following the path of the questions.
“I don’t think—” She stops, glancing back. Bud is climbing out of the water. “I don’t think it feels the way he remembers it.”
I put my clammy hands on her waist—something that feels a little like a spark of alarm bounces through me. “Does he know that? That it doesn’t feel the same?”
She looks over her shoulder, Bud’s shadow falling toward us in a long, cool slip as he walks beneath the neon lights. “He’s finding out.”
The medicinal waters of the Dead Sea roll behind us, and the wild, heavy scent of honey, rocks, and thyme tempers the air. People come to dip themselves in these waters, to be cured of everything from skin ailments to spiritual wasting. The air here is active, undeniable. I breathe it in deeply and sense a sort of dawning sweetness—of loss and nostalgia. Mom must feel some of this as well, because she draws her hand around a ripple of sand beneath her beach chair and says dreamily, “It’s lovely here. Just lovely.”
I touch the liquid sand as well. It turns from beige to amber. It is that simple. Just lovely.
I know the story of their first meeting by heart. My father was working at a malt shop called Cosmo’s in the student-busy section of town near Syracuse University. He wore a long white apron and swabbed a heavy string mop all over the tiled floor, trying to eavesdrop on the conversations in mysterious, hard-sounding English, the language striking in right angles all around his head.
Bud wasn’t supposed to be there. He was supposed to be streaking through the bruised light over Jordan, a pilot in the king’s air force— he and his friend Mohammed (“Mo”) Kadeem, two impatient young men with a flair for scary, last-second decisions. But then Bud’s cousin Soraya turned down Bud’s marriage proposal, and his dignity was so injured that he did the most dramatic thing he could think of and moved to America. In a flash, he was here in this palace of ice cream, lightning-white tiles, and ice-smooth floors, mopping and mopping, wringing his bold youth into a bucket of suds.
Until he saw my mother, and there went the mercury of his heart again. “She was as tall as a goddess,” he tells us in the story of the Day. “So smart, I could take one look at her”—he points to his eye—“and see it right on her face!”
My father slicked in between her and her date, the much-mourned Billy Murphy. (“Such a nice, nice, handsome boy,” Gram says, very sad.) He eased her coat off so it seemed to float from her shoulders. She turned to stun him, once again, with her ocean blue eyes, a fringe of mahogany hair, and a slow, secretive smile.
Were they supposed to come together? I don’t know. Bud didn’t really speak English, and he wasn’t actually a waiter. His Greek boss, Cosmo, watched, bemused, as Bud leaned over their table with a pen and pretended to write down their order. “I thought, What is that nut doing now?” Cosmo says. But Cosmo knew what it was like to be too young, skinny, and crazy in America and was always hiring “special cases.”
Bud ran over to the grill while Cosmo stepped back, folded his arms, and watched Bud rush around with the spatula and bread.
“She want grill-chee-sanweesh—what is grill-chee-sanweesh?” my father lamented, running between ingredients. And even though he didn’t know what white bread was, didn’t know what margarine was, didn’t know what American cheese was, he made her some sort of grilled cheese sandwich. He brought it out to her on a white plate with a sprig of parsley—the way he’d seen Cosmo do it for the daily specials. He didn’t make anything for Billy Murphy.
When I ask Mom how the sandwich turned out, she smiles her drowsy blue-eyed smile, chin on her hand, and says,“I don’t remember.”
The morning after the Dead Sea, I wake with a wonderful hankering for gray gum. I feel as if I’ve been away on a month-long vacation to a cool, distant country and it’s great to be home again. I run to the dukana and buy a piece. As I stand on the corner and start to chew, my friends begin to saunter over—Mai and Rafat, Belal and Hisham. They greet me as cordially as if I haven’t been away at all. We spend the day on foot, running along the alleys in our old style. I am set free. At the end of the day, Hisham and I race to my house. I have flying hair, a skinned knee, and grubby nails—I look like every other child in the streets of this neighborhood. Hisham, as usual, gets there first, but then he pulls up short. Bennett is standing just inside the courtyard, still as stone.
Suddenly the door to a steep place that I didn’t know was inside me has been thrown open. I know I’ve done something wrong, though I can’t put a name to it. “Hi,” I say, guilty and angry.
Hisham looks as shocked as if Bennett is a statue come to life. He takes a step back and bumps into me.
“Don’t touch her!” Bennett snaps at him. He shakes a finger at Hisham. “Do you live here? I don’t believe so! This is our courtyard— not your courtyard.” Bennett’s face is a streaked, liverish color, as if he’s just been slapped. He shrieks at Hisham, his voice leaping into the highest registers, his body rigid and doll-like. “I think you’d better get out of here. I think you’d just better get out!”
Hisham’s mouth opens and closes, as if he can barely get enough air. I grab Hisham’s wrist and am about to suggest we go play in another courtyard, but Hisham turns to me and whispers in Arabic, “Something is wrong with this boy—I’ll go get my mother!”
“No,” I answer, though I’m frightened of the sharp, thin line of Bennett’s mouth. “I’ll stay here. I’ll talk to him.”
After Hisham has gone, for a long moment, Bennett doesn’t speak and doesn’t even give the impression of seeing me there. Then quickly he says, “You know, that isn’t proper. It isn’t proper, and it isn’t done. It isn’t done at all.”
I take hold of the iron spikes of the courtyard railing; they feel cold and rough in my hands. I wish that Hisham hadn’t gone away. “What isn’t?”
The color starts to subside in his face, and I can see him collecting himself. He purses and unpurses his lips, he crosses his arms in a businesslike fashion. Finally he slits his eyes at me as if admitting to himself, at last, that I really don’t know much of anything. “You don’t belong with them! You know that. You know that. The sort you are belongs with the sort I am. Like belongs with like. Father says. No in-betweens. The world isn’t meant for in-betweens, it isn’t done. You know that.”
He speaks as if this is a conversation we’ve had countless times and he’s tired of going over it with me. I lean back and swing on the iron railing while he stands like a stake in the ground, glaring just past the top of my head. I’ve started attending a private school run by the French nuns, and what Bennett says reminds me of something the nuns say. We are forbidden to speak Arabic in school because, according to Sister Hélène-Thérèse
, “Arabic is the language of animals.” She taps the list of three languages on the blackboard, explaining that English “is the language of mortals” and French, she says with a satiny smile, “is the language of the angels.”
“No in-betweens.” My voice is a pale vapor.
“They belong with their own kind. You with me, they with them,” Bennett sums up. “No in-betweens. It’s not allowed.”
I squint at Bennett; his face is blotted out by the sunset behind his back. I don’t know what these in-betweens are exactly, but I feel sorry for them. They might look like the embroideries of the sad-eyed sheep—the solitary ones, apart from their flock, trapped inside the circle of Munira’s embroidery hoop, stitched eternally apart. I imagine them walking the earth, friendless, lonely, and improper, not allowed, lost somewhere in the embroidered corners between the animals, the mortals, and the angels.
“How do you know it?” I press. “How do you know that I belong with you?”
He rolls his eyes. “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” He thrusts out his arm. “Look at the color you are!”
He presses his arm to mine: His is a gleaming, nearly bone white, dotted with freckles and a faint sheen of burn. Mine is grimy and golden with a telltale greenish cast I’d never noticed before, not till I’d compared myself with someone like this. I’m not like Bennett, and he yanks his arm away as if I’ve just done something unexpectedly wrong. But in that moment I realize I’m not like Hisham, either. Not dark. I think about the way the relatives come to visit, standing in our bedroom doorway, appraising me and my sisters, the way their words trickle through the air, dividing us. “There’s the dark one,” they say. “And she—she’s the light one. . . . That one is American, that one is Arab. . . .” I’d never before thought to wonder which of us was which.
Despite Bennett’s decree, my interest in the red scooter has miraculously dried up and gone. I’m once again running up and down the steps with Hisham and my old group of friends. When Bennett approaches me in the courtyard, pushing the red scooter before him like a sacrifice, offering to let me ride it alone for the entire day, I walk past him without a word. Is it possible that I am this heartless? Bennett turns into a shadow and then disappears just as suddenly as he appeared. He slips completely out of my mind and imagination, as do his native foods, his nutritious Horlicks, and his in-betweens. I forget him so quickly that his memory now comes to me in grainy, half-dissolved strokes, like an image made of powder.
Weeks after forgetting him, I am swinging on the iron railing with Hisham, negotiating the details of our engagement, when Mrs. Haddadin calls me over to her chair near the flowering mint plants. She swirls her cup of tea and informs me that “my little English friend” and his mythical parents have moved back to Singapore. It takes me a minute to understand whom she is talking about. Then she gestures toward the staircase and there it is, where it has been all along, ever since I abandoned him, yet somehow completely invisible: the red scooter. “He left that behind.”
The breath goes out of me in a gust. It waits like an accusation.
She watches me and frowns. “Do you know why he did that?” she asks, very curious. “Why didn’t he take his English toy?”
I shake my head, astounded. I don’t know the answer, not inside my head. But I sense it somehow, the truth prickling, a thing that will take a long, long time for me to bring into words: So I won’t forget him.
Mrs. Haddadin sits, gazing up at me, squinting into my eyes, taking my measure. Mrs. Haddadin, who remembers everything and everyone—even a son she has never had—cannot fathom how deeply, powerfully forgetful I have already become. Though I am only eight, I too have already had to leave behind entire countries and lifetimes. Her eyes are orange inflected and amber, too light for her dark cinnamon skin. She gazes up at me from her chair and I look down: I can almost see the thoughts moving within her lamplike eyes, dark and illuminated as jinns. Perhaps at this moment, now that he has gone, she has forgiven Bennett, just a little. Perhaps, instead, she is wondering about me now, as I sometimes wonder about myself: What sort of person am I? Where are my loyalties? And who will I remember when I grow up?
“FORGET ME NOT” SAMBUSIK COOKIES
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Stir together the butter and sugar. Stir in the milk. Add the flour in small batches and knead by hand until smooth. Roll out the dough to 1⁄4 inch thick and cut with a 2-inch cookie cutter. Combine all the filling ingredients and place a good mounded teaspoon of the filling on each round, fold it over, and pinch the edges closed. It’s traditional to then curve the cookie into a half-moon shape.
Bake at 350 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes, until the cookies are lightly browned. Remove the cookies from the oven, let cool, and then sprinkle liberally with confectioner’s sugar.
MAKES ABOUT 35 COOKIES.
I have many favorite people in Jordan: Every morning I run to the boy selling ka’k—fluffy loaves of seeded bread rings—from a tray on top of his head. “Atini ka’k, minfudluk,” I say, and give him two fils. He gives me a hot crusty seed-dusted loaf the size of a Christmas wreath, then he goes back to bawling, “Kaaaaaa’k! ” in the streets. There’s the man whose donkey pulls a wheeled tub full of butter and bobbing roasted ears of corn, and another man who sells hard-boiled eggs and Zataar, a spice mix made of thyme, sesame, and sumac. He gives me a free egg, then salutes as if I am a military commander. And then there’s Munira the Bedouin, who dusts and tidies, does our laundry, and keeps her eye on the children. There is something glorious and half-wild about her, with her falcon eyes and gold teeth. Her hands and chin are tattooed with strings of curling designs, and she blackens her lids with so much kohl that they look as if they’re smoking. Sometimes she talks and talks in a freestyle English-Arabic mixture, as if the words have been bottled up inside her from the moment of her birth. Other times she collapses into a sort of pure, solitary silence. I avail myself of these moments to station myself at her side and tell her all my own problems, which are legion.
Early on—before Bud’s language is in my head—I complain bitterly about the confounding trouble I’m having making myself understood and understanding others. Munira calls me habeebti, which means “my dearest,” and she assures me that I do indeed know “how to speak” but that I’ve willfully let myself forget and will just have to wait until it comes back to me. She counsels me that as soon as anyone says anything I don’t understand, I should just keep responding with aish. Aish means “what,” and this advice quickly gives me a reputation for being a hard-of-hearing, rather crotchety eight-year-old. Munira also teaches me how to divine the future by tossing some stones against the garden wall and reading the constellations they fall into. I don’t know how we afford to employ Munira and Hamouda with Bud so often out of work. It’s possible we don’t give them anything more than room and board. When I ask where they came from, Bud says they came with the family, that their ancestors have been serving Abu-Jabers for generations, and that, in fact, he had been raised by Munira’s mother, and his father had been raised by her grandmother. Munira tells me she learned to speak English as a little girl because Bud’s mother read fairy tales to her while she helped with her own mother’s embroidery work. Because of this, she knows words like “enchantment” and “mermen” and all about the strange Little Matchstick Girl, but not the English words for house or soap or spoon.
When I think how I initially met Hamouda, it seems to me that he was already in our house, sitting on his bare wooden chair in the storeroom off the kitchen, waiting for us when we arrived from America. He’s slow moving and cheerful and doesn’t understand our jokes: Munira has to tell him everything four times before something in his features catches and his face brightens. Hamouda fixes things around the house for us, prays, gardens, and does odd jobs. He has captivating hazel eyes in a cinder-dark face. Bud says he is Circassian, from the hills of the Caucasus Mountains; pious Muslims, he and his family have lived in Jordan since the reign of Stalin. He has a pronounce
d limp that he says he got when his horse fell on him for some reason. I love mentally replaying this tragic scene in a swoon of pity and terror: horse falling, Hamouda falling, crying out, leg splintering. Hamouda lets me and my sisters knock on his hard calf through his pants as if we are knocking on a door. Every time he calls out, “Who’s there?” and then grins so we can see he’s missing almost every other tooth in a splendid repeating pattern. Privately I hope that someday he will hike up the pant cuff so we can see this petrified leg, but he never does.
He is a sweet-natured, sensitive man who tells me that the entire world is contained in our courtyard garden and that I never need leave it, because if I remain in this exquisite place, inevitably all things will come to me. He’s given to exclaiming, “Alhumdullilah!” (“Thanks be to God!”) as if everything good—from a clear day to a scrap of bread—has fallen down to him straight from heaven. He has the mystical power to whisper soothing things to my baby sister, Monica, that make her simmer down and stop driving her crib around the room. And he is the one who escorts us out to the big traffic circle for ice cream every afternoon, holding our hands tightly as we dart across the busy streets.
I adore both Munira and Hamouda, and I worry about their well-being. Hamouda in particular seems so tiny and fragile to me, I’m forever worrying that he will stumble or be injured by some new peril, another crashing horse, perhaps. It comes to my attention that his and Munira’s daily meals consist almost entirely of our family’s leftovers, and every day I fret over whether or not enough food will be left for them. I make sure to always leave half of my dinner on the plate. On one particularly warm day, Hamouda comes in from gardening blotting his temples with a rag, his skin blotchy and uneven. He looks peaked and his limp is more pronounced than usual. While he is taking his daily nap in the storage room, I decide that we will save him the trouble of escorting us to get ice cream. I know where Bud leaves the ice cream money and the extra house key, so I gather up my little sisters and we take ourselves out.
The Language of Baklava Page 6