The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  They echo my words in confirmation, one of them crying, “God is great!”

  The crone reaches over and pats Munira’s knee. “What a bizarre child,” she says, and wipes her eyes. “Truly God is great.”

  At the main open tent, the men are seated like the women, but on cushions. Their ring is large and wide open so every man is included and equal—no one sits behind or in front of anyone—unlike the women’s crowded, unruly circles. The men’s ring is more intense, charged with debate and dramatic storytelling requiring hands to be flashed through the air, voices to leap. Bud leans into the conversation. He is more than happy—he looks bigger, wilder, louder, truer— as if some vital piece of him that I never knew existed has been returned to him.

  Seated next to my father at the top of the circle is my great-granduncle, the sheikh, a tall, graceful man with a white waterfall of a beard that covers the front of his immaculate white robe. His old, noble nose is big, round, and important, and while he doesn’t say much, his eyes pull at you with all sorts of magical powers. It’s immediately clear to me why Bud would bring his questions to this man. When we arrived the sheikh kissed my father four times on each cheek, rumpled his hair, and asked if Mom was one of Bud’s daughters. The women bring the sheikh his tea first, and a young boy stands at his right side, languorously waving a fan.

  I gaze over the ring of women’s heads as I watch my father talking. Then I notice my mother loitering at the edge of the women’s ring, holding my sisters’ hands. Her expression is hard to read through the hot, watering air, but her head is lowered, moody and wary. I catch, in that glimpse, what profoundly different planets my parents are from, how improbable it is that they are joined together. And I sense a deep weirdness about my own existence in the world. How could these two people have ever found each other? How could I have ever come to be?

  A baby goat is killed discreetly and somehow silently, behind a tent. Mom stupefies me by grabbing the back of my shirt and saying that this is something I don’t need to watch. A few hours later, it takes three strong, stringy men to upend the immense cooking pot onto a serving platter big enough to hold Monica. People gather around to watch the great pouring of the mensaf. The meat, rice, bread, and sauce mingle, satiny as a risotto. Its aroma streams through the air, thick and liquid; the air sparkles with it. The silver tray nearly covers the table, and we stand in a circle, pressing against the edge. The men and the women eat separately, but because we are special guests, they invite us to eat with the men. It’s so crowded that we must stand sideways, with one hand—the right—turned toward the food. The tent is a goat-hair canvas staked to long poles covering our heads but open on the sides so the wind pours through and works the canvas like a bellows. The moment feels charged and fabulous, like the opening seconds of a play, and everyone presses close. The old sheikh nods and says, “Sahtain, sahtain, alhumdullilah. ” (“To your health, thanks be to God.”) And so we start.

  Mensaf is to be eaten hot-hot, as soon as it emerges from the heat. The whole first month we lived in Jordan, my mouth and tongue stung and I was constantly sucking air through my teeth, until I finally understood that I had to let the food cool off a little. Mensaf is also to be eaten with the hands—as the Bedu eat everything: You dip your fingers into the mixture, and the rice is hot and wet on your skin. You scoop up a bit of food in the palm of your hand, palm it gingerly so it is round and soft, an impromptu dumpling, then push it into your mouth with your thumb and forefinger. This is all done quickly, cheerfully; everyone eats from their own private section of the tray, yet there is a good deal of rearranging of the meat so the choicest pieces are arrayed in front of the guests. There is an intricate blend of aromas in the air: I smell onions and nutty rice, as well as the rich field-and-dust scent of the cotton robe on the man standing in front of me, and mingled with all of this is a teasing thread of spices—ginger, nutmeg, pepper.

  The goat melts into the rice melts into the sauce, and I cannot separate the eating from the food itself. The steam from the food dampens my face. The Bedouin men all take turns carefully feeding the little foreign girls, our skin pale and shiny as soap, our eyes round as coins. Monica compliantly accepts everything offered—which will turn out to be too much, later on. But for now, she lolls on a woman’s lap while a man squats before her, tenderly offering her morsels as if she were a baby bird. There is so much food that it seems limitless: No one will ever go hungry.

  After the dinner come platters of fruit—oranges, lemons, figs, pomelos, grapes, bananas, dates, eskidinias—or loquats. The men unsheathe short, pointed daggers from their sashes—stashed beside their longer curling swords—and peel the fruit so its sweet incense fills the air. The food has released them from their need to debate great topics. Now they are in the mood to recite poetry and sing. The men and women seem to recall the pleasures of each other’s company, and they intermingle, the men offering the women peeled fruit. Two men sing dreamily about longing and the impossible necessity of love beside a fragrant wood fire, while a woman draws a bow over the stark single string of her rebab. The crone nestles her long bony body against the sheikh’s long bony body, and he gazes at her and runs his fingertips along the side of her lined cheek.

  Munira sits beside me on the ground, picking out the intricate pomegranate seeds to feed to me. And I wait, content and expectant, as if I’d been born to have someone sit beside me and painstakingly feed me. I love the crunch and sweet, winy squirt of the little seeds and resolve to eat many more pomegranates in my life.

  Munira strokes my hair back behind my ears and says, now in the city Arabic, “Wouldn’t you like to stay here with me forever?”

  I feel as if I’m drifting backward into the ground, as if my drowsiness is drifting up from the earth. “Yes,” I say. “I’d love that.”

  “You could be my little girl. I would feed and dress you beautifully.” Her hand sweeps over my head. I’m lying down, gazing into the sky—it’s still light out, but I can already see the moon. “Your mother has the other little girls, and she can have even more. But I have none and I don’t have a man to give me any!”

  “Why don’t you get a man?”

  “I’m much too old now, it’s too late.” Her voice is hazy and far away.

  “How old are you?”

  “Almost thirty, I think.”

  I consider this. “I would be your little girl,” I murmur.

  “Besides, this is where you belong.” She draws one finger along my face. “You’re a wind baby.”

  “Am I a Bedouin?”

  “The Bedu were here first,” she says as if she doesn’t hear me. She looks up at the emerging stars, and I admire her angular profile, her skin tanned as old leather. “We were here before any of this city nonsense, before any of these crazies from Europe or anybody.”

  I nod dreamily, imagining the Bedouins at the beginning of time.

  “We know things that no one else does.” She puts her hand over my wrist, and the matter is settled. “I’ll teach you everything, just wait.”

  I nod again, surrendering to the hand.

  I doze a bit, the scents of the day ribboning through my sleep. When I wake, there’s a soft woven blanket wrapped around me. The sun has set and the moon is pointed and stark in the cold new air. I roll over to one side and see a group of men strolling together toward the open desert. I hear the sheikh and my father’s voices. I think, Bud must be asking his question.

  Then they’re laughing; they’re holding something up over their heads, and there are vivid cracks of light. They’re shooting off their guns. Is this an answer?

  Munira is asleep beside me: The firelight is soft on her face—I’ve never seen her sleep before—the map of wrinkles is blurred, and her face is younger and smoother, as if in a fairy tale. One of her hands rests on the edge of my shirt. I sit up and watch her sleep for a while before, somewhat regretfully, I get up and go in search of my mother and sisters. I find them sitting in the crook of a log before another fire,
my sisters asleep, my mother gazing sternly into the flames. “You ready to go?” she asks, her voice crisp. Her face is painted with the golden light; she is as beautiful as the sun behind the mountains. “I think it’s time.”

  A broad-winged bird flies low over our heads under the moon. Its call is spicy and low. If I had stayed by Munira’s fire for one more moment, I might never have left at all.

  The car is full of sleep: Bud is the only one awake, driving. But the reflected starlight slips over my eyelids and into my dreams. Finally I sit up inside our dark, shared chamber. My mother’s head tilts as she dozes, her hand resting lightly on my father’s leg. There’s a white Bedouin scarf loose on his shoulders, and he smells like sumac, thyme, and fields.

  “Dad, Dad,” I whisper to him, “did you ask your question?”

  He doesn’t respond right away. Then he seems to nod faintly. He sighs and says, “Did you know . . .” His voice trails off as if he is distracted by his own thoughts, then picks up again. “Did you know that your grandfather’s eyesight was so good he could see the eye of a bird flying by? And that your great-granduncle can smell the water hidden underground? And your uncle Ramzi—they say he can hear an earthquake before it starts shaking.”

  Aha, Bud is in one of those moods. I’ve seen it before—where he sits up in the dark and gazes out the window at whatever it is he sees. It’s something I puzzle over until the night I catch myself doing the same thing.

  “I’ve already forgotten everything,” he says, his fingers slipping over the notches in the steering wheel as if over a string of prayer beads. “I forgot how good the food tastes under a tent. And the wind smell in the valley.”

  I think of the big blowing tent and the hot mensaf and how purely good everything tasted after a day in the open air. Then for some reason I imagine Uncle Ramzi, this man alone in his cave, murmuring with the earth, its deep voice telling him all sorts of things about the stars and moon. Something snags in my chest, the tiniest barb, as if I am catching Bud’s mood. I can see the city lights just beginning to glow on the horizon, their diffuse rosy haze. I wonder if we will ever spend time among the Bedouins again. Deeper down, from beneath that question, emerges a larger, more formless question, something about whether people have to decide exactly who they are and where exactly their home is. Do we have to know who we are once and for all? How many lives are we allowed? But it’s too strange and somehow a little frightening to ask anything like this.

  Easier instead to slide back down on the seat, into the gentle scent of Munira’s clothing, close my eyes, and pretend to fall fast asleep.

  BEDOUIN MENSAF LEBEN

  Lamb is substituted for goat here, in deference to what is

  stocked in American grocery stores.

  *Shrak is a very fine, thin bread available in some specialty food stores.

  Place the lamb in a large pot, cover with water, and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat and simmer for 20 minutes. Skim off any fat that drifts to the surface, leaving behind a lamb broth.

  In another large pot, stir the egg into the buttermilk and bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly; otherwise the buttermilk will curdle. Reduce the heat to a simmer and continue stirring, for about 20 minutes.

  Transfer the lamb to the buttermilk mixture and reserve the broth. Add 1 cup of the lamb broth to the buttermilk mixture and stir thoroughly. Simmer for about 1 hour, stirring occasionally. Add salt and pepper to taste.

  In the meantime, cook the rice in 2 cups of the lamb broth. Add salt to taste.

  Sauté the onions in 1 tablespoon of the butter until lightly browned. Add the onions to the buttermilk mixture toward the end of the cooking.

  Layer the bread on the bottom of a large serving platter or wide, shallow cooking tray. Pour enough of the buttermilk mixture to soak the bread. Spread the rice over the bread in a low dome. Place the lamb over the rice. Pour the buttermilk over the meat (but not so much that it becomes soupy. Reserve any extra buttermilk sauce and serve it on the side for those who’d like more).

  In a small pan, sauté the pine nuts or almonds in 2 tablespoons of the butter until the nuts are lightly browned. Sprinkle over the meat.

  Dot the whole dish with slices of the remaining butter before serving.

  SERVES 6.

  FOUR

  A House and a Yard

  America is a cold breeze that snaps us awake. We’ve been gone for a year, but once we’re back, I keep recognizing types of trees, stores, buildings, and blurting out, “Oh yeah!” We’ve left Jordan, with its lush winds, dust, and sun-stained air. When I wake in a hotel bed on the first morning back in America, I’m dazed by a blankness around me: the sleekly painted walls, the air slack without the scents of mint, olive, and jasmine, and an immobilizing silence. I close my eyes and conjure the songbirds Mrs. Haddadin kept in a gold cage hanging from a tree branch; the wobble of Munira’s singing as she dashed a broom through the courtyard. It is almost too much to imagine I will never hear them again, so I lie in bed for as long as Mom will let me, listening.

  We’ve returned to Syracuse, to a split-level house that does not have another family living in the upstairs apartment or a communal courtyard or thick hedges of mint. But this house does have a generous backyard for tearing around in. All around us are trees and confined, suburban fields.

  There is something mothlike about the houses in this new neighborhood—in the morning they look half-dissolved. They are sided in tentative shades of beige, dove gray, avocado, cream, and colonial ivory that shimmer in the cold New York morning fog. There are picture windows, two-car garages, foyers, family rooms, and big basements. The neighbors seem hesitant to emerge from their glimmering homes, and we almost never see anyone outside. But we quickly find out about Mrs. Manarelli next door. She lives in a house nearly identical to ours, with her grumpy husband, Johnny, and her son, Marco, who’s my age and notable for having what could be the world’s largest collection of Monkees 45s. Mrs. Manarelli has powdered white down all over her face, two rouged spots high on her cheeks, and a low, peaked hairline. But she also has a gaze that feels soft as kisses on both your cheeks and a way of looking at you that makes you want to lean into her. Her parents were both from Italy, and since she was born in Brooklyn she says that makes her an immigrant, too.

  Mrs. Manarelli travels around the neighborhood with covered bundles that at first I think are babies. Then she comes to our house and I find out that it’s food: pasta slippery with fresh pesto, or a plate of grilled sausages, or a whole roasted chicken. She cooks and then she looks for people to feed, because Johnny is always on a diet and Marco is delicate and sensitive and allergic to everything. When she and Bud meet, it’s as if they’ve found each other at last. She raps on the glass of the kitchen door as Bud fries some lentils and tomatoes and onions. “Hey, you!” she calls. “Whatcha doing in there? What is that in the pan?”

  Bud lets her in and she waves at us on her way to the stove. “You put butter or what in there?”

  And so their conversation begins.

  She hovers around my father while he cooks, asking accusatory questions about his technique and attempting to doctor the spices. He laughs and tries to hold her back with one arm.

  “What you doing it like that for?” she demands, her newly set hair in a stiff wave around her head. Then she bawls through the kitchen door at my mother (who’s reading, stretched out easy, long legged, on the couch in the next room), “Pat! He’s about to put something yellow in this beautiful rice!”

  “Sumac wakes it up,” says Bud the poet. “You don’t know yet. Just wait.”

  “I don’t want my rice awake or sleeping,” says Mrs. Manarelli. “Can’t I just have it in a bowl?”

  But once she tries it, spooning it right out of the pan, she nods with her spoon in the air and says, “Okay, yeah, I see your point.”

  My favorite neighbors are my new best friend, Sally Holmes, and her parents. Bud says that they are “real Americans.” Sally has a pe
rt turned-up nose and pink freckles and ringlets of ribbon red hair. Her mother wears her hair in a glorious upright pillar called a bouffant. Every year, Sally’s parents put up a ceiling-high, rotating, carol-piping, aluminum-silver Christmas tree in their family room. When I first behold this tree, my heart speeds up and little jittery bursts pulse under my skin: I feel shame over our own three-foot, stationary, non-snow-sprayed tabletop version. Sally and I sprawl stomach down on the floor of her darkened living room and play Ouija board by the red, green, and white strobe lights of her tree. We ask, “Who does Harry Meyer like?” and, “Will I ever in my life have a boyfriend?” The planchette flies over the board, spelling out hostile maniac answers like “You wish you, HA HA HA” and “Never you you never now.”

  Mrs. Holmes comes out of the kitchen with a silver tray of instant chocolate pudding in single-serving aluminum tubs and says, “Cocktail hour, ladies!” It tastes like burnt plastic, but I study the way Sally and Mrs. Holmes scrape their tubs and lick the spoons. Later she pours us crystal cups of gummy eggnog from a carton. I jiggle my glass, fascinated with the way its surface quivers in place.

  This is American food, I tell myself. I don’t like it, I think, because I’ve somehow forgotten it. I must remember.

  The days grow crisp and sharp. People raise their eyebrows, look at the clouds, and say things like “Yup, it’s coming all right.”

  On the news, the reporters recount stories about how many people were buried alive in cars under snowdrifts in previous years and how many more they anticipate going under this year. Then I look up one day from a book I’m reading in English class to see that the windows of the classroom are filled with whirling, white chaos. There is no day, no night, just snow and our huddled weak light inside.

  Three days after Christmas, Sally’s father, Max, unravels the garden hose and floods their backyard; by the next morning the yard has frozen into a skin-smooth skating rink. Sally loans me her old skates and she wears her new Christmas pair, the leather a gleaming bone color. At first my ankles feel loose and untrustworthy and I sway from side to side, but the feeling gradually starts to come back to me, from years of skating at the public rink with my grandmother. As I remember, I begin to relax, to lower my wobbling, windmill hands. Sally and I spend hours that day skating in circles. Mrs. Holmes brings us hot chocolate with tiny crunchy marshmallows floating in it. We sip and warm our fingers, but we stay out on the ice. The sun goes down early and my toes start to tingle and then hurt, but I can’t stop.