The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  It’s an easy walk through the lime white streets. After months of running all over the neighborhood with my friends, I already think of these streets as mine. My sisters toddle and bump along, uncomplaining. Even at their tender ages—two and four—they realize it’s more interesting to go for ice cream like this than in the predictable grip of Hamouda’s leathery hand. I have a new little brass bell that Bud bought for me, the kind they drape on goats. I like to wear it around my neck on a piece of string and swing my head back and forth like Frankenstein so I ring with each step and notify the neighborhood of our movements.

  We get to the circle where the ice cream vendor is. As with so many things—fruit, pancakes, eggs—the ice cream here, which looks the same and feels the same as American ice cream, tastes nothing like it. It comes only in a striped Neapolitan, which Hamouda refers to as “Napoleon”: The chocolate is thin and flat, the strawberry is berryless, and the vanilla you generally save for last, until there’s just no avoiding it, its resinous, perfumed flavor tasting faintly of rose petals and soap.

  But it’s ice cream! So we approach the man at his stand, and he stares over our heads, looking for our usual guardian. He gives us a long, dismayed look and says to me in Arabic, “Where is your keeper?” but I simply stare back, afraid that he will send us away. I hold the coins out flat on my palm, and the transaction takes place. He hands us the soft yellow cones with their cylinders of brownwhitepink ice cream. Then my sisters and I huddle together in the busy center, the ice cream sliding all over our hands and faces; and I’m disappointed all over again with Neapolitan and wish for the hundredth time for chocolate marshmallow.

  Inside the big traffic circle, there’s a great deal of commerce and activity. A woman with thick black eyeliner ties up cut flowers in raffia, a man dips falafel balls into vats of spitting oil, another man carves through stacked layers of shawerma meat, piling the grilled tips into pita sandwiches. Children—tough, rakish little boys with narrow faces and quick, narrow eyes—stare at us and our abundance of ice cream, and some big girls hold hands and talk, affectionately tilting their heads on each other’s shoulders. I look straight ahead and notice that somehow we crossed an enormously busy street to get inside the circle—cars and taxis careen around us, horns blaring.

  It dawns on me that I’m not entirely clear about how we did this or how we will undo this. The cars whir by, blurring the air. A haze of smoke and dust hangs in a ring around us, and a quivering sense of anxiety runs up my arms and down my spine. The tough boys seem to be moving in closer, and the ice cream man is shutting up his stand as if disavowing all responsibility. I see that my youngest sister has lost her ice cream in a gluey mass down the front of her shirt, and though I’ve finished mine, I still taste the awful vanilla in the back of my throat—medicinal, wrong. I reach for my sisters’ sticky hands. Everything is wrong: I hear English-Arabic, French-Arabic— someone is leaning in too close to talk to me, and the makeup around her eyes turns to smoke. The flower lady. Her words come to me as if from far away: “What is your name, little girl?” she asks in English. Then she tries French: “Where do you live?”

  I say, “My name is Diana, and we live on the other side of the traffic circle!” But for some reason this comes out in Arabic.

  She looks so startled that for a few seconds she doesn’t speak. Eventually she exclaims in Arabic, “You’re Jordanian! How could it be?”

  Then, from off in the distance, I hear a familiar voice, and this sound cuts through my imminent panic like a bell in the fog. I look over the bank of cars through the haze to the opposite street, and there is Hamouda. His limp is distinctly more pronounced as he hurries, nearly running toward us, his face contorted and working.

  I’m faint with relief and squeeze my sisters’ hands so my middle sister, Suzy, complains. But when Hamouda gets closer, I realize that he’s crying. I’ve seen children cry and I’ve seen a few women cry, but never before a man. I didn’t think that men actually could cry, and even through my panic and shock and relief, I can’t stop staring. He runs directly into the swirl of traffic, and as Jordanian drivers are masters of sudden shocks, their cars part seamlessly as he hobbles across, dodging, swerving, and jumping, patting and pushing hoods as if he is wading through a herd of wild goats. He runs his lopsided run the last steps of the way, and when he reaches us, he calls out, again and again,“Alhumdullilah!”

  I run to him, inhaling the musty tobacco scent of his shirt, shut my eyes and memorize the feel of his hands on my shoulders, the sense of pure, ineluctable rescue. I gaze at him, drink in the sight of his eerie pale eyes in that dark country of a face and the transparent lines of tears. He woke and we were gone, he tells me. He wondered for a second if he had dreamed us. He looked for us everywhere, and finally Mrs. Haddadin told him where we went.

  “Alhumdullilah,” I echo like an old Bedouin or an old Circassian. It is exactly the thing to say at a time like this, like letting out a breath. And he stares at me a moment. Then the tiny man bends over, takes the three of us in his arms, and hoists us like an offering. His arms are tough and wiry as cables. “Alhumdullilah,” he says again, very seriously and purposefully. He hugs us wildly. I laugh and look up, and the sky over his head is as blue and sleek as a piece of slate.

  AMAZING ARABIC ICE CREAM

  Done right, this is incredible.

  *Sold in specialty stores.

  Dissolve the sahlab in 1 tablespoon of the cold milk. Put the rest of the milk in a saucepan with the cream and sugar and bring to a boil. Sprinkle in the milk-and-sahlab mixture, stirring. Stir the mastic into the milk, lower the heat, and simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  Add the orange blossom water, remove the saucepan from the heat, and stir well. Pour the mixture into a freezer tray and place in the freezer. Once frozen, remove from the tray and beat well. Freeze again until ready to serve. Serve in small silver bowls, if you have any, and sprinkle the pistachios over the top.

  SERVES 6 TO 8.

  SAHLAB is a white powdery starch made from the ground tuber of an orchid.

  MASTIC is a natural resin produced in the Mediterranean from an evergreen shrub of the pistachio tree family; it also happens to be excellent for stomach ailments.

  ORANGE BLOSSOM WATER, a uniquely fragrant flavored water, is also used to make “white coffee,” a popular Middle Eastern drink made by adding orange blossom water to boiling water and sugar.

  It’s as if there’s only a certain amount of space in my brain, and the more space Jordan takes up, the less room there is left for America. Sometimes I lose track of what language I’m in and gibber between the two of them, substituting English words for Arabic and vice versa. My favorite breakfast is no longer pancakes, but bread doused with oil and Zataar. Just once in a while, something reminds me of my former life: a woman who laughs like my grandmother or a Jordanian cousin who smokes his cigarette the way an American cousin does.

  When these reminders occur, I stop and think: Am I still an American? And it confuses me, because it seems like a kind of unbecoming or rebecoming—to turn into this other Diana—pronounced Dee-ahna, a Jordanian girl who has forgotten the taste of fluffernutter sandwiches or Hershey’s bars. But sometimes there are hints of other places. For example, there is a swanky hotel in the middle of town where we go to buy the American newspapers. In their carpeted lobby with the wrought-iron tables and chairs, they serve tea in china cups, alongside blue-and-white plates filled with hard cookies that taste of a million miles away. These “biscuits” disintegrate between my teeth, falling into basic component flavors—jam, sugar, flour. They aren’t very good, and the tea is a weird mystery of crushed leaves and condensed milk— none of it is especially American, British, Jordanian, or anything else. But I crave this tea service because alongside the frilly plates and pots of this and that, they also serve a small kettle of piping hot chocolate for the children. Like the ice cream, it tastes nothing like my memories of powdered cocoa mix, but unlike the ice cream, it’s
much better than the original. It tastes faintly of cherry and cream, and deep inside this, I believe I taste echoes of the sharp, sweet Hershey’s bars of the corner store just down the street from our house in America.

  SENTIMENTAL HOT CHOCOLATE

  Stir all the ingredients except the heavy cream together in a saucepan over low heat until the chocolate melts. Increase the heat and cook until the hot chocolate comes to a low simmer but is not boiling. Pour into mugs and top with the whipped cream, if using.

  SERVES 2.

  Jordan, it seems, reveals itself slowly. There are layers of mysteries like scarves in a scarf dance. There is the mystery of the traffic circles all over town that have no clear rhyme or reason. There is the mystery of the Jordanian drivers, who drive partially by steering and partially by hanging out the windows and yelling at one another. There is the mystery of the woolly white dust that travels through the air and deposits like silt along curbs and store windows, which we dust from our shelves and tables every morning, only to find it redeposited by afternoon. There is also the mystery of the particular wind that brings the dust, a storm the Jordanians call the khumiseen, meaning “fifty,” as in fifty days and nights of blowing dust storms. Munira tells me to never open my mouth when this particular wind is blowing. It’s the sort of wind, she says, that carries bad omens, random or misplaced spells. It is a wind filled with unanswered questions, unfinished conversations, and lost personal items of great sentimental value. Munira warns that if this wind gets inside you, it will blow through your organs, dry your throat, howl in your ears, and stand your hair on end.

  One day, after we’ve been in Amman for nearly a year, Bud says we’re going to visit the source of the winds, at the center of the valley. This is where our family started, Bud tells us, within this tribe, this territory; and some of my father’s oldest relatives, including his granduncle, the sheikh, still live there. According to family lore, my Bedouin grandfather could barely stand to sleep with a roof over his head. Bud’s father wanted to raise his children in the country among the Bedu. But their city-raised Palestinian mother had other ideas. She bought a house in town close to the school and taught her children to sleep in beds and eat from plates. Then in the summers she turned them over to her husband, who let them sleep outside with the animals and, as my grandmother put it, “run around like savages.”

  Eventually all the brothers but one left the Bedouins to move permanently to the city or immigrate to America and pursue their sophisticated lives. The last, Bud’s youngest living brother, Uncle Ramzi, went to live in a mud cave all by himself in the desert. People said that Ramzi was somewhat peculiar, a little “original.” The uncles called him “the Last Bedouin.” The one time we went to visit him, Bud had us children wait in the car while he and Uncle Hal crouched outside a hole in the side of a hill and shouted his name. Uncle Ramzi crawled out of the hole, his face and long hair streaked with gray mud. I watched him laugh, throw his arms around Bud, and lift my big, strong father right up off the ground. Then he crouched down and waved at us through the car windows, and we waved back at his great, weathered, extraordinary face—the sort of face a tree or hillside might have—all of us crying, “Hello, Uncle Ramzi!”

  Today Bud is wound up; he sings Arabic love songs about nightingales and broken hearts and the seashore, and he drums lightly on the steering wheel. This is the most upbeat we’ve seen him in the past several months, as he’s come home increasingly dejected from this or that “donkey animal” of a boss, this or that “blistering nightmare” of a job. It seems that something inside of Bud isn’t suited to certain indignities of work: His ambition is tremendous, but he chafes under petty managers and has no patience for formal education. His father intended him to be the family warrior—pilot, fighter, fencer; a gentleman soldier. But he left that life behind when he immigrated to America. Now, back in Jordan, nothing quite adds up for Bud, not in the way it does for some of his brothers. He is going to meet with his granduncle, Sheikh Ali Alimunah, the head of the Bedouin tribe, because he says he is seeking answers; he has big questions he has to ask the sheikh.

  “What’s your question, Dad?” we plead and whine, hanging on the backs of our parents’ seats, kicking at the bases, and crawling over Munira’s hard, narrow lap. But he only grins and shakes his head. And part of me is glad he won’t tell. I have the feeling that perhaps even he isn’t sure of what the question is yet.

  The wind gets stronger as we drive the serpentine back road into the valley. The soil is parched yellow here, and dust hangs like cobwebs in the briars and weeds. The sky reels back, falling away in a white canopy. We turn the car onto the broad valley floor and it’s ferociously sunlit; birds pass like chips of glass through the hot air, sand swirls into question marks. I’m practically drunk with my sense of the moment, jittering with my own questions. I’ve never met anyone who’s lived in this kind of heat before.

  Eventually, the whiteness of the sky separates itself from the pale earth and there is another whiteness at the center of it all, moving like many hands lifting, the sides of a hundred tents. Each of them ripples as if about to take flight, billowing and floating with wind. Crammed in the backseat between me and my sisters, Munira sits forward, her expression intent: It seems everything in her has sharpened with the smell and heat of this air, the sight of these tents. “Now we are returning to the center of life,” she says in Arabic, and squeezes my wrist. I want to tell her that I couldn’t be returning—I’ve never been here before. But the glowing wind rushes through the half-open windows, and the words are rinsed out of my head.

  Baby goats and blatting lambs mill around as the car turns into an open clearing by the tents. It takes me a moment to realize there are people here. They blend into the swirling air with their robes. I’ve seen plenty of Bedu in the city: Their weirdly ancient style of robes and loads of heavy silver jewelry, their sun-cured, nearly blackened skin, tough feet, and frightening teeth all make them seem like an ornate variety of street people. But we’ve never gone so far into the countryside before, and in this wide, wasting light, this white rinse of land, they seem transformed and so appropriate—as if it is the city and its soft, pale people that shouldn’t exist. Here, there is no such thing as time, there are only curling robes, high winds, undulant camels. I also notice a mud-blasted Range Rover kept in the stables and a transistor radio propped on a cushion in the men’s circle like a talkative guest.

  We park beside a donkey, and the Bedouins clap and ululate and stroke the car. Then they lift their hands and Munira seems to levitate from the backseat right into their arms. I go with her because I can’t quite release the crease of her robe I have clenched in one hand. Suddenly I’m in a press of women, their hands streaming over my head and arms, bangles, necklaces, anklets ringing, rich perfumes as dark and heady as blood running together in the atmosphere. Their shining voices fill the air as well. I can understand only snatches of what they’re saying—running commentary on my unimaginable hair, skin, eyes, lips, fingers, toes.

  “Look at this, where did this come from?” one woman seems to be asking about me.

  “She’s mine!” Munira answers, slinging one arm across my chest and pressing herself into my back. “She belongs to me.”

  It seems likely that the curious women will strip me naked right then and there and carry me off, but my equally impressive mother— taller than both the men and the women—wades into the crowd, calling for me and creating more of an uproar. My little sisters, I discover, are already bedecked in silver bracelets, their eyes being painted with kohl by some of the other women.

  After the shock of their greeting wears off, however, I begin to understand that spending a day with the Bedouins is not so different from spending a day with my father’s family in town. The men and women drift into their separate activities; Munira takes me by the hand and leads me to a large, fire-heated rock outside one of the tents. Here a crone with a black-seared face sits flat on the ground, one leg to either side of the wide
flat stone. Another woman mixes flour and water, another pats the dough into shape, and the crone tosses this onto the hot stone, where it browns and puffs up. Another woman plucks the hot bread from the rock, and yet another places it in a stack of loaves.

  They laugh and chatter, and their bodies relax into the murmurous air—it reminds me of the debkeh dance—the ring of interlaced participants, arms around shoulders, the movement dissolving into sound like sugar into milk. I sit among the women, my body filled with the charged scent of the bread, the lilt of their voices. I am understanding more and more of what they are saying, and it finally dawns on me that they’re speaking Arabic—a stiff, bookish sort of Arabic, the kind in our school texts—classical Arabic—from hundreds of years ago, the verbs and pronouns more timeworn than “thee” and “thou.”

  One of the women points her tattooed chin at me. “What does she eat?” she asks Munira.

  “I like jameed,” I pipe up. “And ka’k and Zataar. And also chewing gum and hot chocolate at the big hotel.”

  The women all stop what they’re doing and stare at me. The crone hoots. “She speaks!” she says in her crackling voice.

  Munira smiles a modest little smile. “A bit,” she says.

  “But why does she speak like that?” the first woman says. “Like a cat eating a bone.”

  Munira shrugs. “They all talk like that in the city.”

  “Come on, child,” the crone urges me. “Say more!” They swivel back toward me.

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t born with the ability to think on the spot. I open my mouth, take a deep breath, and blurt out, “Bread! Table! Mouse!”

  The women bleat with laughter and the crone doubles over, almost toppling onto the heated rock. I glow with this unexpected triumph. “Milk, moon, tree! Feet, water, lizard! Bus, neighbor, napkin!” I gesticulate a little for emphasis.