Eventually the snow trance breaks like a fever and the long, glowing highway tapers into plowed roads at the edge of the town. Uncle Hal and his family live in a rural area that piles plowed heaps of snow ten feet high on either side of the street. We pull up to his house, jelly legged and faint of heart, the iced-over driveway creaking beneath our feet. My sisters and I lug the tray out of the car. Uncle Hal stands in the driveway to greet us. He waves tongs in one hand. Uncle Hal has set up his big kettledrum grill outside, under the icicle eaves of the house. The grill sends a stream of smoke up into the cold-bitten sky. This may well be the greatest meal of all time—ground kofta kabobs, shish kabob, beef ribs, and vegetables—all grilled outdoors during a snowstorm.
My parents shake the snow out of their hair and laugh. “What is the point of this?” Bud asks. With a sweep of arms, he’s indicating not only the grill, but the snow, the cold, celebrating New Year’s Eve, the alien lunar landscape.
“I don’t know, brother,” Uncle Hal says. “I do not know.”
“Look at us! What are we doing?” Bud’s black hair is now white and feathery with snow. “What is this, the North Pole? We’re crazy to live here. This place isn’t made for people to live.”
“Ours is not to reason why,” Uncle Hal says, turning pieces of chicken and squirting the coals with extra lighter fluid for good measure. He holds up a leg with his tongs and admires it. “You see this chicken leg? This chicken leg contains the wonders of the world and the seven heavens. Someday I will write a poem about this chicken leg.”
The charred, winy aroma mingles with the sparkling flecks in the air. Uncle Hal grills a row of sheeshes, then stacks them on platters, and the children carry their own plates to the kitchen table. The adults sit away from the children in the dining room, which frees us to eat as wantonly and barbarically as possible. Ed illustrates how he can fill his entire mouth with roasted zucchini. The juices stain our lips, and we slump and make loud caveman groans as we chew. We use pieces of bread to push the meat and fire-scorched vegetables from the skewers onto a big communal platter—or right into our mouths.
The world seems exciting and strange tonight, the well-deep blackness in the window full of tracery, translucent clouds swimming over the moon. After we finish eating, I lean forward and mutter, “Well, I sure hope you appreciate that we’re here tonight.”
My cousins stare at me, waiting for the joke.
“Yeah, well, you know what? We were all nearly slaughtered tonight driving around out there.”
Monica and Suzy exchange bright, startled glances.
“Oh yeah?” Cousin Jess grins broadly. “So what happened?”
I shrug lazily and eat a morsel of lamb kofta. “Oh, there’s some sort of psycho killer who just escaped from prison, and he’s out there driving around in the storm in an old beat-up black car, running people off the road and cutting them into little pieces.” I hold up another chunk of lamb kofta between my thumb and forefinger. “About this big, I think. They say his teeth are pure gold. We heard about it on the radio. That’s the real reason they closed the roads. Since we’re staying up all night, of course, we’re probably going to run into him at some point, and then God only knows!”
At this point, five-year-old Monica runs wailing to our mother in the other room. I grab my forehead. I have no idea where that story came from or what moved me to tell it, and now I realize it might have been better if I hadn’t. Gram says that I’m a hostage of my imagination. I have trouble teasing apart the worlds of dreams and reality. When I was eight some neighborhood kids told me that their mother wouldn’t allow them to talk to me until I stopped fibbing. I’d been terrorizing them with a daily serialized tale about my work as an undercover agent combating a race of half sheep–half men from Venus. Then they’d be up half the night, howling at every creak in the house.
A familiar voice flares in the kitchen doorway, saying, “You are such a big noodlehead, Diana.” It’s our cousin Hanna, her American mother, Jean, and Hanna’s tiny, mummified father, Abdelhafiz; they live down the street from Uncle Hal and specialize in dinnertime visits. Hanna and Jean are both heaped up with masses of flesh the color and sheen of cottage cheese. The corners of their mouths slant sharply downward, and their hair falls in glossy black ringlets around their faces so they resemble angry Kewpie dolls. Their every glance emanates an air of disapproval. Hanna drags my tearstained sister back into the kitchen, holding her by the wrist. “What sort of idiot tells her little baby sister that there’s a psycho killer on the loose?”
“I don’t know,” I say sullenly.
Aunt Jean says, “Tch,” and waves her hand at us as if to make us all evaporate. She goes off with her husband to join the adults, and Hanna plunks down at our table and pulls the platter of meat under her chin. “What’re you morons eating?” She stuffs some kofta in her mouth and grunts. “Ugh, overcooked!”
Hanna is only fifteen, just two years older than Jess, but she refers to us as “the kids” and is forever lecturing us on how none of us will ever amount to anything. Hanna frequently informs people that she plans to attend Swarthmore, the college that her mother’s second cousin attended, which she holds up as the pinnacle of education. She also likes to tell us that in all likelihood none of us juvenile delinquents will ever make it to college at all at the rate we’re going. Even Monica looks annoyed with her. Our hour of eating barbarically is over. It’s practically midnight.
BARBARIC LAMB KOFTA
This is at its most wonderful when barbecued over an outdoor grill.
Not necessarily at the stroke of midnight,
but it adds a certain something.
Mix together all the ingredients with your hands until evenly blended. Shape 1⁄4 cup of the lamb mixture around a skewer in an elongated (3- to 4-inch) sausage shape along the length of a skewer. Repeat with the remaining mixture.
Grill the kofta over hot coals, turning, for about 5 minutes on each side.
Serve with yogurt blended with 1 teaspoon lemon juice and 1 crushed garlic clove.
SERVES 4.
After dinner, we watch Dick Clark and the ball about to drop in New York City. The moment feels laden with mystery and tension, as if for one second the world has agreed to pay attention to time itself. All the ghostly faces and Victorian figures in the old oil paints that line my uncle’s walls stare at the big, boxy TV. All the books and Persian carpets and even the old piano hold their breath. Finally, absurdly slowly, the big ball slides down its pole. My birthday is close to New Year’s Eve, and I was born on the cusp of a new decade, so when the year turns, I feel that I have aged along with the earth. I am newly eleven, but I am ancient. The lingering scent and smoke of the grill fixes the moment inside of me.
My parents, aunts and uncles, and Hanna all hug and kiss one another, and the children squirm away. My father and uncles exchange a look: another year that they’ve lost to their new country. Then the men groan and bend and collapse backward on the couch. From there they launch into one of their favorite pastimes—complaining.
My father, looking older than usual, drapes one wilted arm over the edge of the couch. Is there gray at his temples? He sighs, squinting at the TV, and holds up one tragic hand. “Who is this man, this Dick Clark?”
“I don’t know,” Uncle Hal says in an equally hollow voice. “I just don’t know.”
“Too many times I think we’ll never get home again,” Great-Uncle Abdelhafiz says. “It’s like we’ve gone poof.” He looks around the room unblinking, as if he isn’t sure he’s really there. Tiny Uncle Abdelhafiz has skin the color and grain of petrified wood and liquid, glimmering eyes. His mother was one of my great-grandfather’s two simultaneous African wives, and I often have the sense when looking at him that he wishes he could somehow escape from these two bossy women in charge of him and go back to Senegal.
“So many people disappear,” Bud comments dolefully.
“What about Danny Thomas?” Uncle Hal asks. “What happened to him?�
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“Dead,” Uncle Abdelhafiz says. “Nice Lebanese boy.”
“Never mind about Danny Thomas, look what happened to your whole family! Look at young cousin Farouq, Great-Uncle Ziad, Auntie Seena, and Jimmy’s son Jalal,”Aunt Jean cuts in disapprovingly.
“Dead, dead, dead, and in jail,” Uncle Hal says, dusting off his hands. “The police wanted me to come bail Jimmy’s kid out last week, for the third time this year. I said, ‘You guys take him for a while.’ ”
“He’ll never amount to anything,” Hanna puts in, easing her head back on her round neck in a bored, luxurious way. “No future, no nothing.” She rotates her head to view the children. “Most of these Abu-Jabers can’t survive this country. It’s too much for them. They’ve got to have discipline, they’ve got to be watched every second. You should ship them all back!” she says with a regal fling of her hand.
Uncle Abdelhafiz stares at his wife and daughter for a few moments as if he cannot, for the life of him, recollect who they are. “I want to go home,” he says in a voice like an echo.
Uncle Hal clicks his head back, chin up. “What home? Show it to me. You’re planning to go home? Just listen to this poem I wrote yesterday on this very subject.” He squares his shoulders and intones: “Lo, the days of yore / When life was full / The sun was hot / And things were not / Such a bore. . . .”
Bud sits with his arms crossed and his eyes closed, nodding in solemn agreement. He opens his eyes to see the children bunched up on the couch across from them. “Americans,” he mutters. “We’re surrounded by Americans.”
Their drowsy, hypnotic complaints go on and on. My mod green plastic wristwatch reports it’s a disappointing one a.m.
Mom flees the room of complaints in order to prepare the dessert. She and Aunt Rachel turn the oven up to full blast—knaffea should be served piping hot. Then they try to clear a bigger space on the kitchen table for the immense silver tray. This is challenging because for the past twenty or thirty years, Aunt Rachel has been writing something called “the great American novel.” It towers in great foot-high stacks of manuscript pages all over the table and the floor around the table, so if you eat there, you’ve got to put your plate on a pile of pages. Mom says that Rachel won’t let anyone read it until she’s done, so it has assumed an air of mystery. When you look closer, though, it turns out that the pages are mostly typed correspondence she sends to various newspaper editors sharing her insights, opinions, and idle ruminations on the issues of the day. There is a letter on top of one stack concerning the sorry state of the geopolitics of Southeast Asia.
Hanna and Jean walk around the stacks of pages with their faces tight and their hands drawn in. “I see you’re still working on that book of yours, Rachel,” Aunt Jean says. “Still the same one, right?”
This comment is bothersome and nasty, like a hairy sweater. Auntie Rachel barely seems to hear it, though; her mind is on higher things. She is wonderful to discuss life and literature with. She tells me that Samuel Beckett was a gangster and Joyce a pervert and that no one can really enjoy Henry James until they’re forty-five. She says that Flannery O’Connor is a mad genius, Hemingway is much better than you’d think, and two years of college is almost enough to civilize most people. She’s against suicide but has observed that, in contrast, murder makes sense. She says that dinner is a moral imperative and dessert is its own reward.
One time she shows me a novel by a popular writer and tells me that he’s a big, bald-faced liar.
“But—I thought that he wrote fiction,” I say, confused by the literary distinctions.
“The difference between fiction and lying,” she says irritably, “is the difference between imagination and laziness.”
She tells me all sorts of things and never seems to notice that she’s talking to an eleven-year-old. I am passionately devoted to her.
Aunt Rachel removes the knaffea from the oven and places it on its sumptuous tray; the shredded phyllo dough is crisp and brown, crackling with hot, rose-scented syrup. Nestled within, like a naughty secret, is the melting layer of sweet cheese. The pastry is freshly hot, the only way to eat it, really, with its miraculous study in contrasts— the running cheese hidden within crisp, crackling layers of baked phyllo and the distinctive, brocaded complexities of flavors. It’s so hot that it steams in your mouth, and at first you eat it with just the tips of your teeth. Then the layers of crisp and sweet and soft intermingle, a series of surprises. It is so rich and dense that you can eat only a little bit, and then it is over and the knaffea is just a pleasant memory—like a lovely dream that you forget a few seconds after you wake. But for a few seconds, you knew you were eating knaffea.
Aunt Rachel, an American like my mother, learned to make knaffea as a young bride during her correspondence with her husband’s Palestinian mother, Anissa. My grandmother was said to have been intellectual and bookish, as well as an expert maker of knaffea and other pastries. When Anissa was made to leave her home in Jerusalem and went to live with my Jordanian-Bedouin grandfather in his remote desert place, she dreamed up a new home for herself in her books. My father, who never took to formal education himself, looked upon his mother’s library as a pilgrim might have looked upon the icons in a cathedral. He knew this was something to revere. And years later, Aunt Rachel, who never really took to cooking, looked upon Anissa’s recipes in much the same way.
My grandmother was only forty-eight when she died, not long before my mother married Bud. She had borne innumerable children—some say seventeen, some say only nine. She died while most of her sons were far away in America, before they had a chance to see her once more. Now the knaffea calms Bud and Uncle Hal down. It makes them remember their mother, and they forget again about being surrounded by Americans.
Uncle Hal goes back to the living room, gets out his one-stringed rebab and bow, and sits on the couch beside Bud, drawing forth the rebab’s rickety, stirring music. Together, they sing “Ridi Ha” in their soulful voices. The brothers lean against each other, gaze at the ceiling, and sing as if the song has been written just for them, a song for the time between late night and early morning, when life is filled with uncertainties and boundaries have gone blurry.
In the kitchen, Hanna and Jean ignore the music; they are holding their plates and forks in midair. They look disoriented and out of sorts. Hanna, who has just taken a bite, bleats at her mother, “But your knaffea isn’t this good!” as if she has duped her.
Jean’s features seem to elongate; she stares at her fork. Finally she sniffs, “I think it’s too sweet.” I look away, embarrassed for her—we all know that’s a lie. Then she adds, “I suppose this is why you’ll never finish your book, Rachel. You spend your time fooling around in the kitchen.”
And then the room is holding its breath. The night expands and the kitchen ceiling lifts and the taste of the knaffea lingers in memory like a musical phrase. Like the wounded look in my auntie’s eyes. The moment passes quickly, so almost no one sees what has occurred, neither the suspended moment of time nor the hurtful exchange at the kitchen table. There is a nearly imperceptible quickening in the atmosphere. But then my mother stands beside Rachel protectively, gathering dishes with a deliberate rattle; a cool efficiency settles over us like a compress.
MAD GENIUS KNAFFEA
*Kadayif dough is a kind of shredded phyllo dough, similar in spirit to shredded wheat; it is available in specialty food stores.
†Alawi is a mild sweet cheese available in import food stores.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. In a mixing bowl, cut and fluff 1⁄2 pound of the knaffea dough with your hands. Add half of the melted butter and mix until the dough strands are evenly coated. Spread evenly in lightly buttered 17 × 13-inch baking pan.
Spread alawi over the kadayif in the pan.
Cut and fluff the remaining 1⁄2 pound knaffea dough in the bowl. Add the remaining melted butter and mix with your hands until the strands are evenly coated. Spread the dough over the top of the chee
se layer, pressing down firmly to form an even surface. Place on the lowest oven rack and bake until golden, about 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, prepare the syrup. Combine the sugar and water in a pan and boil for about 10 minutes. Take the pan off the heat and add the lemon juice, rosewater, or orange blossom water. Refrigerate while the knaffea is baking. As soon as the knaffea is removed from the oven, pour the cold syrup evenly over the pastry. Cut into squares to serve.
MAKES 24 TO 30 SERVINGS.
My eyeballs feel dry and tight, as if they are stuck in the wrong sockets. I turn to Jess. “I don’t feel tired yet at all,” I say, wired. “Do you?”
Her eyes look slotted. “Ha. I’m wide awake.”
Monica is asleep with her head on the kitchen table. Suzy is sternly watching Aunt Jean as if she will be making out a report on her later.
Aunt Rachel’s rooster clock on the wall above the stove holds its drumsticks up over its head. I stare out the window at the blue-smeared stars; I think, This is what two in the morning looks like on the North Pole.
The children who are still awake leave the grown-ups to their past. We retire to the library, sling skinny arms around each other’s necks, and instigate several hundred more rounds of “Auld Lang Syne”— each of us with his or her own unique interpretation—until Hanna comes in and says we sound like a bunch of demented gorillas, then goes back out. We discuss this and decide that we’ll sound better with musical accompaniment. Ignoring the prim upright piano backed against the wall, we rummage through the kitchen cupboards for pots and pans and large, club-size spoons. We pound the pots in time with our song and make such a fierce racket that the adults yell and grab their heads and suggest that it’s time to take it outside. So we pull on our jackets and mittens and boots. We run past Hanna, who folds her arms over her chest and says, “Thank God! You were giving me a headache,” just like someone’s mother.
The Language of Baklava Page 13